


By Any Other Name

by astolat



Series: Witcher works [8]
Category: Wiedźmin | The Witcher (Video Game)
Genre: Disguise, Empire, M/M, Training, Witchers, machinations
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-09-28
Updated: 2017-09-28
Packaged: 2019-01-06 11:49:24
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 25,418
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12210708
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/astolat/pseuds/astolat
Summary: Vesemir wasn’t sure what he’d done to deserve any of this.





	By Any Other Name

**Author's Note:**

> So I asked for prompts on DW and potted_music said "Geralt/Emhyr AU in which Emhyr is a witcher too" and I was all lol, how on earth could Emhyr have ended up as a witcher, and then this story happened. 
> 
> With heaps of thanks to Speranza and monicawoe for beta!

Vesemir wasn’t sure what he’d done to deserve any of this. Most witchers—at least, the ones who survived becoming witchers in the first place—got to live a solid century and reach that magnificent pinnacle where experience and skill and strength aligned. Shortly after slipping down the other side of that slope, they got to die a nice, quick, clean death in battle against one monster or another. If you were lucky, you might even leave behind a legend or two.

But not him, oh no. Not only had he lived long enough to start experiencing the indignities of old age, and find himself relegated to the position of training master, but now _this_. He scowled at the thin, hollow-cheeked boy on the other side of his desk. “What the hell do you mean you won’t do it?” he barked.

“I will not be made sterile,” Duny said flatly.

“You’re fourteen years old, who were you planning to get with child?” Vesemir said, but Duny just closed his mouth and stared at him in the way Vesemir had already learned to hate in the three weeks he’d spent dragging the boy back to Kaer Morhen with him.

He’d had a bad feeling about it the minute the villagers had cornered him in their tavern. He’d been on his way back from a supply run to Ard Carraigh, and he hadn’t really meant to stop so early. His back had just twinged a little bit, right as the inn had hove into view over a rise, and he’d thought _I’ll just stop in for a drink, warm my hands by the fire_ —that was the first place he’d gone wrong, clearly. Then half a dozen villagers had come clamoring at him with a tiny purse and a crazy story about a monstrous beast in the forest—with no actual injuries to show him—and Vesemir had sighed and slogged off and tracked down the beast to its lair, his second mistake, which he’d compounded with the third of noticing that the cowering skinny thing had been trying to _write_ in the dirt with a stick.

He’d run a hand over his face and said to the creature, “You’re cursed, aren’t you?” The only bones around were rabbit bones—damn villagers probably only objected that the beast was taking prey out of their traps.

The beast—covered with hedgehog spines and spine bent over like a curve, had actually _nodded_. Damn half-assed curse. Should’ve made the victim go rabid and mad, leaving a witcher with nothing to do but kill him nice and quick. Instead, Vesemir had the pleasure of a ploughing week in a cold, wet cave working out how to lift the curse, and afterwards he ended up with a half-starved boy on his hands who ate all his rations and flatly refused to say where he’d come from, even after Vesemir had told him threateningly that if he hadn’t anywhere else to go and no one to pay for the curse-breaking, he’d have to go to Kaer Morhen and become a witcher.

Duny—even getting that much of a name out of him had been an effort—had just shrugged, and then he’d silently followed Vesemir’s horse for three hours without complaining, even though his feet were bleeding when Vesemir finally sighed and stopped. He’d had to empty his already slack purse to buy the boy a pair of boots and a shirt and trousers to replace his rags. No more comfortable taverns on the way home; he’d even had to take a contract halfway, just to buy more food. He’d dragged the lad out into the graveyard with him and made him watch the butchering of the ghouls close, in hopes of scaring his tongue loose, but even _that_ had backfired when one of the things burst out of the dirt not three feet from the boy.

Vesemir had been forced to hurl himself at top speed over four tombs to kill the thing—strained his hip, dammit—and afterwards he’d stumped over to the boy covered in ghoul blood and the remnants of corpses and demanded, “Well? This the life you want? Sure you can’t think of a single person anywhere in the world who’d give a handful of coin to save you from it? What about your damned parents?”

Duny had stared up at him with the same wiped-blank expression, not a flicker of fear showing; he’d even grabbed the reins of Vesemir’s terrified horse and held her during the fighting. “My parents are dead,” he said, and that was all. So Vesemir had flung up his hands and hauled him along the whole way, having to spend a great deal longer on the road with his extra baggage.

“And _now_ you’re objecting?” Vesemir said, glaring at him. “I _told_ you about the Trial of the Grasses—”

“I do not fear the Trial,” Duny said. “I will take the mutagens. But I will not be made sterile.”

Vesemir sighed from the depths of his toes. “Listen, you young ass, the mutagens we’re going to give you almost all have teratogenic effects—know what _that_ means?”

“That they will affect my unborn children,” Duny said, taking a bit of the wind out of Vesemir’s sails; he scowled. The lad had found the library not an hour after the gates had closed behind them; he’d been inhaling books like the other boys inhaled food. He must’ve found one about the mutations.

“Right,” he growled. “Not one child in ten that a witcher sired would even be born alive, much less healthy. And what would you do with them if you got them? The Path is no place for a father.”

Duny was silent, and then he said, “Not _all_ mutagens are teratogenic. Do some also have more significant effects than others?”

“Certainly,” Vesemir said warily.

“Then I will omit those.”

Vesemir rubbed his face. “We don’t give you the mutagens _for the fun of it_. The rule is, the strongest mutagen you can survive is the one that does the most _good_. It’s also the one that has the strongest effect on your body. You skip any significant part of the regimen, you’ll be lucky to make it out of training with your fellow students, much less survive the Trial of the Medallion.”

“I will manage,” Duny said.

“And _even then_ ,” Vesemir said through his teeth, “you’ll _still_ be lucky to have one healthy child in five. Going to saddle a load of poor unwitting village girls and city whores with deformed babes they’ll have to put the blade to themselves, just on the chance of getting one to stick your name on?”

Duny’s mouth tightened. “I will take no advantage of any woman.”

“Is that so?” Vesemir said. He took out his silver knife and slapped it down on the desk between them. “Remember this? I used it to cut the quills from your body to burn them and break the curse. You want to skip the greater mutagens? You’ll cut your palm and swear on this blade that you’ll never lie with any woman who doesn’t know what she risks, on pain of having the curse return with threefold strength.”

He should’ve known better. Duny instantly took the blade and drew it across his hand, sending red blood dripping all over Vesemir’s table, and said, “As you have said, so do I swear.”

“Oh, for fuck’s—” Vesemir stopped and leaned his head against his hand and sighed heavily. “Fine! Fine, leave it, get out of here,” he muttered. Chances were Duny wouldn’t survive the Trial of the Grasses anyway, whether he skipped half the mutagens or not. Unless the gods truly hated Vesemir and wanted him to be miserable.

#

Naturally, Duny survived just fine. And naturally, the second Vesemir started the surviving lads on their training, all of them were walloping Duny like a damned combat dummy. They loved it, too: boys that age were like wild colts when they got their witcher strength and speed; they wanted to kick up their heels and _feel_ it, and what better target than an ordinary boy, or as close to one as they were going to get. Duny was picking himself up off the field and limping back inside covered in blood at the end of every day, and not even witcher healing—which he didn’t have in full measure either—could keep up.

Vesemir went and hauled his limp body up off the field at the end of the fifth day. “Well?” he said, significantly. “It’s not too late. Elstrid says you were tolerating the mutagens well. No reason you couldn’t manage the rest of the regimen.”

Duny’s head was hanging. He raised it slowly and looked at Vesemir and said, “No.” Then he straightened himself with an effort and walked back inside to the dining hall without limping. Vesemir threw up his hands and stomped off to his office.

Three hours later, he heard a faint clanging of metal and wood and looked out at the training ground for a far more pleasant sight: Geralt had come out for a second round after lunch, of his own accord. Now _there_ was a boy who wasn’t going to waste all Vesemir’s efforts. He’d survived the standard regimen so handily that the infusion master Elstrid had kept going: he’d managed half a dozen _extra_ greater mutagens. He was almost as far beyond the other lads as Duny was behind them.

Of course, even Geralt still had no business training alone, but he was so satisfying to watch that Vesemir sat looking out his window for several minutes before he heaved himself up and went downstairs to go stop him. Geralt even took correction well—only looked abashed and muttered an apology when Vesemir reminded him training alone was the best way to lock in any mistakes you made in form.

“Get another of the boys to come out and practice with you,” Vesemir told him, more tolerantly, after he’d finished making his point. Not that he was going to say so, but truth was, Geralt wasn’t making any mistakes in form. The extra practice wouldn’t hurt him any, and might even help another of the lads.

But Geralt made a slight grimace, easy enough to read: none of the others wanted to train with him. “They’re resting,” he said, laconically.

“Then you can spend the time on a run, or lifting weights,” Vesemir said firmly, and went back inside. He paused when he clambered back up to his office, though: the clanging was already going again, and with a frown he went to the window and then stared: Duny had come out, barely patched up, and faced off against Geralt. Damn, it was pitiful to watch. Geralt was having to pull every other blow not to whack the other boy’s head off. Vesemir scowled. That was going to ruin Geralt’s follow-through. He’d have to go back down _again_ and put a stop to it—

“Wait,” Duny said, stopping and letting his sword sink down. “This is no use.”

Geralt lowered his blade and said apologetically, “You’re a little slow.” 

“I am _very_ slow,” Duny said. “Stop trying to fight me. Mirror me.”

“Huh?” Geralt said.

“We will go through the sword-drill together, mirror-fashion,” Duny said. “I will get quicker the more I repeat it, and you will learn to do it with your weaker side, and improve your control from going at my pace. When I can keep up with you, then we can try fighting again.”

That wasn’t stupid; in fact, it was _professional_. That was how a swordmaster trained a weak young pupil. So Duny had been given lessons, sometime, and from a good teacher. Vesemir glared down at him. Well, it stood to reason the boy would’ve had to be _someone’s_ son to be worth cursing, not to mention all that nonsense about not being made sterile. Someone somewhere had filled him with the notion it mattered that he carry on his family line. Vesemir shook his head with a sigh. The boy would learn soon enough that a witcher had enough to worry about keeping _himself_ alive—assuming he even made it through the week.

#

Geralt wouldn’t have thought of asking Duny to train with him, but it turned out pretty well, actually. None of the others wanted to fight him now, and it made him feel like a bully or something when everyone else had hurriedly paired off and whoever was left over unhappily came to him. Doing mirror drills sounded boring, but at least it was a _challenge_. And though Duny was slow— _very_ slow, as he put it—he was actually a lot more careful than any of the other boys when it came to form.

“I must repeat it a hundred times to have the speed that comes to you after three,” he said, “so I must repeat it perfectly, or else I will forever do it wrong. I cannot afford to relearn it.”

He talked that way, oddly formal, and when Geralt asked him why, he paused and then only shrugged, which meant that it was one of the things he wouldn’t talk about. Some of the other boys didn’t like talking about home either, but he took it further than any of them. Geralt didn’t remember any place other than Kaer Morhen, himself. He’d been given to the witchers at the age of two, and he’d grown up with sword oil and the smell of steel and potions all around him. He’d seen four other groups of boys vanish into the Trial of the Grasses before he was old enough for it himself; he’d always known it was ahead of him. But Vesemir had brought Duny in not two weeks before their group had gone in. He had to have grown up somewhere else, had to have had some people of his own, but he wouldn’t talk about them.

No one else was talking to Geralt about _anything_ , though.

They’d all woken up in their new quarters after the Trial, each of them in a room in the actual keep with only one other boy—an amazing luxury of space after being crammed in six to a room in the cold drafty wooden barracks down on the lower level of the fort. They took their meals at the long table in the Great Hall with the grown up witchers. It all felt like they’d _moved_. It helped. You could pretend the other boys had all just—gone somewhere else. Or maybe that they were still back at the barracks.

The only thing was, Geralt had woken up later than the rest of them, almost a week later, and when he’d first seen himself in the mirror he almost hadn’t recognized his own face: all the color had leached out of his skin, and his hair was growing in white at the roots. And on the training grounds he was faster than all of them, now; faster and stronger and _better_. Lambert was really angry about it: he’d been the best, before, and all of a sudden he wasn’t anymore. But all the other boys still followed him, so when Geralt managed to pull off a new move first try, and Lambert loudly hissed, “Teacher’s pet,” the others snickered along with him. It pissed Geralt off, but he didn’t know what the hell to _do_ about it. He’d never had trouble with the other boys before. He’d been mostly nice to them, and they’d been mostly nice back, even Lambert.

Duny was the only one who didn’t take Lambert’s lead at all. Of course, that was partly because Lambert jeered at _him_ , too. “Hey, slowpoke, look out, it’s a grave hag!” Lambert had yelled at lunch that day, after he fired a roll sopping with gravy at Duny’s head. It had hit Duny in the face and left him dripping and all the boys laughing. Geralt had been across from him, and he’d seen Duny’s hand clench, but Duny hadn’t said anything back; he’d just taken the roll from where it had fallen next to him, put it on the side of his plate, and wiped his face and went back to eating.

Duny was a little late to their extra practice that afternoon: he came out with his hair and face freshly washed, and his clothes damp where he’d scrubbed them clean. He hated to be dirty: he bathed every single day if he could manage it. Geralt said a little awkwardly, “You okay?”

Duny glanced at him and then said, “Geralt, one of these days, Lambert will offend you to a similar extent. When it occurs, will you tell me before you do anything?”

“Uh,” Geralt said, startled, “sure? Why do you think—”

“Because he is too angry to be sensible, and will not permit himself to recognize that provoking you is idiotic,” Duny said.

Geralt paused and realized Duny was right: Lambert was just mad at _everything_. He’d been mad since he’d been brought in, four years ago, and he’d gotten more mad since the Trial of the Grasses. None of his roommates from the barracks had moved up to the main hall. They’d all…gone away. “Why is he angry at _us_ , though? They did it to us too.”

Duny shrugged. “I imagine if unchecked he _will_ eventually end by offending one of the instructors enough to be punished. However, I do not care to wait that long.”

Geralt said slowly, “If—if you want—”

“No,” Duny said, before he even finished. “I do not care for you to be my champion. When Lambert has given you cause, we will act together.”

Geralt personally felt that he’d just as soon have done something _before_ Lambert got around to pissing him off that much, but there was no point arguing with Duny when he’d settled something in his own head. He sighed a bit. “Ready, then?” he offered.

Duny nodded, and they got to work. 

Three days later, Geralt went back to his room after their afternoon practice and stiffened as soon as he opened the door: there was a stink coming from his _bed_ , and when he jerked back the covers there was a steaming pile of oozing green-glowing gel, mutagen waste from the lab. He glared down at it, heat traveling up his neck into his face, and then he turned and stalked out and down the hall to the room Duny shared with Rondel. The door to Lambert’s room, across the hall, was standing just a little ajar, and Geralt could hear faintly stifled giggles from inside as he went past it.

Duny was alone, sitting on his bed reading; he glanced up when Geralt came into the room and put his book aside. “What did they do?”

“Left a pile of mutagen sludge in my bed,” Geralt said flatly.

“How unfortunate for Rondel,” Duny said after a moment. “Just when you had exchanged places with him.”

Geralt blinked. Rondel wasn’t there; he was one of Lambert’s tagalongs, so he was probably behind the door sniggering with the others.

“Come,” Duny said, getting up. They bundled up Rondel’s handful of things, carted them over to Geralt’s room, dumped them on the bed, and took Geralt’s stuff. The giggling inside Lambert’s room had stopped by the time they went back the other way. A few minutes later, Rondel appeared in the door and said, a little belligerently, “What are you doing on my bed?”

“Mine now,” Geralt said, mildly.

“I don’t want to switch!”

Geralt shrugged. “Don’t care.” Rondel stared and then took a couple of steps towards the bed with his fists clenched. Geralt looked up at him and said, “Try it.”

 Rondel stopped, hesitating, and then turned and went out of the room. Geralt looked at Duny. “How does this teach _Lambert_ a lesson, though?”

“This does not,” Duny said. “However, he must now do something on Rondel’s behalf, or appear weak to his followers. Tomorrow morning he will attempt something a little more vicious—something poisonous in our food, I imagine. Those cortinarius mushrooms that grow around the stables, perhaps.”

“Poison!” Geralt said.

Duny shrugged. “Witchers have enormous tolerance. It is unlikely to kill you, and I am generally assumed to be doomed in any case.” Geralt frowned; Duny talked about it as casually as if he didn’t care.

“So we get there early, before he has a chance,” Geralt said.

“No,” Duny said. “We arrive slightly late, and you exchange our dishes for Lambert and Morgan’s.”

“Uh, what about the teachers?”

“What can Lambert say without admitting his own guilt?”

“What if there _isn’t_ poison?” Geralt said. Duny just looked at him.

Geralt was still steeling himself to feel like an idiot right until he got to the hall the next morning with Duny and saw Lambert and the others all bent over their bowls eating studiously, fighting to control smirks. His jaw tightened, and he grabbed his bowl first and shoved it under Lambert’s face, taking Lambert’s bowl away at the same time, and while Lambert jerked up with his face indignant, Geralt swapped Duny’s bowl with Morgan’s. “Enjoy,” Geralt told Lambert flatly, and sat down to finish off what was left in his bowl.

Lambert stared, open-mouthed, and looked around towards the instructors, but none of them were even paying attention; Vesemir and Romin were yelling at each other over the best kind of crossbow bolts to use on griffins again. He jerked his head back and said loudly, “What the hell, Geralt! That’s my bowl!”

“What’s wrong with the one in front of you?” Geralt said, eating on.

Lambert’s face went red, and he grabbed the bowl to heave it at him. Geralt whipped back instantly and got his hand on the underside even as it came off the table and easily shoved it all the way up into Lambert’s face. Lambert jumped back from the table spitting frantically and wiping the porridge off his face with both hands, his chair falling over. Then he lunged towards Geralt with his hands clenched, furious, and Geralt leaned back almost level with the bench to let the punch go over his face, balancing himself, and after it passed, he swung his legs over and his body up and slammed a punch solidly to Lambert’s jaw.

Lambert lifted off the floor and crashed down hard. The instructors _did_ glance over at that, but only for a moment, and then they all went back to their breakfasts and conversations. Geralt stood breathing hard, still blazingly angry, until Duny reached out and put a hand on his arm and said, “Geralt, your breakfast is getting cold.”

“Yeah,” Geralt said tightly, and sat down. By the time he’d gotten back on the bench he was feeling a little vaguely sorry for having slugged Lambert that hard, the anger sliding out of his grip.

Lambert picked himself up after a couple of minutes and went out of the hall. Morgan just sat staring down at the full bowl in front of him the rest of breakfast, not looking anywhere near Geralt. The instructors didn’t do a thing.

“Why _didn’t_ they?” Geralt said to Duny afterwards. He found himself getting angry again at last, but in a different way, stronger. “They _should’ve_ done something. I just slugged another student. Why don’t they care?”

Duny sighed faintly. “Geralt, there were forty-six boys in your trainee group when I arrived. There are twelve now. The instructors poisoned the rest and buried their half-mutated corpses. They will count themselves lucky to get six witchers back from the Trial of the Medallion, half of whom will not survive their first year on the Path. They do not care because they cannot afford to care. They are here to beat enough skill into us, in these three years, to give us a chance. That is what they can do for us. I find it preferable, myself, to any pretense of affection or fairness. Is it fair that you should strike Lambert, or that he should poison your dish? No. Nor is it _fair_ that you are more resilient to mutagens, and therefore have twice the chance of survival he does. Yet that is the reality of the situation. If you permit it to make you angry, you must be angry at all the world, and make yourself as ungovernable as Lambert.”

Duny didn’t say anything about his own chances of making it through. He didn’t sound angry about any of it at all. Geralt walked silently beside him to the training grounds. Morning practice happened like it did every day. Vesemir didn’t say a word about what had happened at breakfast, even when Lambert appeared with faint reddish welts all over his face and swollen puffy eyes. At lunch, Duny nudged Geralt to sit far up the table, near the instructors, and Lambert sat at the other end of the table as far away from them as possible, hunched over his plate. The other boys ate in between, not looking at either of them.

Afterwards they went back to their room. Geralt sat down heavily on his bed and watched Duny, who had picked up one of his stack of books and started reading like nothing at all had happened. “How do you _know_ these things?” Geralt burst out. “How did you figure out Lambert was going to do that? _He_ probably didn’t know he was going to do it yet.”

Duny’s shoulders went stiff in the way he did when Geralt had gotten too close to something and he wasn’t going to say a word more, except abruptly he said, very flat, “My father taught me,” and only then clammed up and went back to staring at his book, but he wasn’t really reading. Geralt had no idea why it made him feel better, but it did.

#

Lambert didn’t pull any more shit with either of them after that, and neither did any of the other boys. Duny slowly got decent, and Geralt got better and better. Six months in, Vesemir started having Geralt fight the best of the others three on one in the mornings.  Duny started pairing off with one of the slower boys in actual fighting. They both ended up going to lunch with roughly the same amount of cuts and bruises. They still kept their afternoon sessions going until the first anniversary of the Trial of the Grasses; that morning, Vesemir said, “All right, it’s time I stopped coddling you all. Back out here after lunch today.”

All the others groaned, and Geralt felt like groaning too; he didn’t want the others muscling in on their private practice time. But Duny just looked intent, and as they walked to lunch and Geralt complained to him, he said, “This will not be a mere practice session. He is going to teach us something new. Signs, I imagine.”

“What?” Morgan said, overhearing. “What’s _signs_?”

“Witcher magic,” Duny said. “Have you never noticed them summoning fire? Or the golden shielding Vesemir uses when he and Romin spar?”

All the other boys darted looks at each other; Geralt blinked himself. “When have you seen Vesemir spar?”

Duny raised an eyebrow. “The instructors take exercise some evenings in the back courtyard. It is visible from the library balcony.”

Everyone was practically vibrating with excitement after lunch, even before Vesemir came out and showed them the _Quen_ shield. He frowned when they all just sighed happily instead of looking surprised, but then went on in his gruff lecturing way. “Fussing around with spells in the middle of a fight is a good way to get killed. A witcher learns five signs only: simple, flexible, _fast_. Learn them well, and they will save your neck. Fumble them, and they’ll get you killed just as effectively. They must become as natural to you as ordinary speech. And you must prepare yourselves: that mastery will not come naturally,” he added. “The Trial of the Grasses has opened your minds a crack to the source of magic, which means that all of you will _eventually_ be able to master the basic forms, _if_ you work at them steadily. You will practice _Quen_ every day for a month. By the end of that month, _maybe_ half of you will be able to produce a shield on command. That’s how hard it’s going to be.”

With that encouraging lecture, he called Geralt up front and showed him how to stand, how to position his arms and hands, made him say the charm aloud several times—“Once you’ve mastered it, you won’t need to speak the charm, but for now, it’ll be useful,” Vesemir added—walked him through deep breaths and told him to focus all his will, and then had him try it. “ _Quen,_ ” Geralt said aloud, concentrating as hard as he could, trying to imagine that golden shield around him, and a jolt went through him as a flicker of gold ran over his fingers.

“Good!” Vesemir said, looking as pleased as the sour old witcher ever got. “Go and practice over there. Mind that you focus and concentrate _every time_. Don’t get sloppy.”

Vesemir worked through everyone in an order that Geralt realized halfway through the afternoon was his ranking from best to worst, and he was getting perfunctory towards the end, like—like he didn’t care, like it was _a waste of his time_. A hard tight knot formed in Geralt’s stomach as he watched Duny sitting on the side while Vesemir called up every one of the other boys before him. Finally it got to his turn, because there was no one else left, and Vesemir called him up and said, “All right, were you paying attention?”

“Yes,” Duny said. Vesemir made a brief jerk of his hand, _go on_ , without even helping him get into position. Geralt stopped working on his own shield; he almost wanted to go over and help Duny himself, show him—

Duny moved crisply into position, raised his hand to the right point, and then clenched it in swiftly without even saying the charm loud enough to hear. Abruptly a whole bubble of golden light surrounded him, head to foot, and gleamed for an instant before it shrank down and settled over his skin like a faint sheen of gold.

Vesemir gawked, and then reached up and _whacked_ him, hard, with the flat of the blade—which crashed into sparks of gold and bounced right back off. “Well, I’ll be damned,” Vesemir said. “Do you have any elven blood?” Duny stiffened up all over and only shrugged slightly. Vesemir snorted. “All right, boy, have it your way. Doesn’t matter. Wherever it came from, you had a touch of the gift already, that’s plain. You might actually live to see the Path after all.”

Geralt was almost bursting with relief and joy when they went in to wash up before dinner. “Did you hear him?” he said to Duny. He almost wanted to sling an arm around Duny’s shoulders, except he couldn’t quite make himself; Duny radiated a sense of _don’t touch me_ all the time.

“Yes,” Duny said, but he didn’t sound any more excited or pleased than he’d ever sounded scared.

Geralt stopped in the hallway. There was no one around, everybody else had all gone straight to the dining hall, but Duny had started hauling Geralt with him to wash before meals, telling him it was horrific the way they all ate all over sweat and gore. “Aren’t you even _glad?_ ” he said, exasperated.

Duny stopped. “Glad?” he said, like that was a foreign country he’d only ever heard of and didn’t have any idea how to reach. “It is…necessary. I cannot die here.” He paused and then added, “I will not die here.”

Geralt stared at him. He almost felt mad. He’d done a good job not letting himself notice the death hovering close around them all the time, until Duny had shoved his face into it and made him feel it, and now here was Duny saying with that perfect confidence, although he was the worst of all of them, _had_ been the worst of all of them— “How do _you_ know?”

“It is not my destiny,” Duny said, like that made any sense at all, and then he walked on into the washroom.

#

At least Vesemir seemed to agree, now. Within a week he already had Duny learning different stances and casting positions while the rest of them were still working on getting the Quen shield up at all, and in the morning sessions, Vesemir made him combine casting with his sword-work, and started pulling him out for the one-on-one sessions he only did with Geralt and a couple of the other boys. “Faster!” Vesemir barked, and slapped a blow in to knock Duny over if he didn’t get his shield up in time. “Not good enough!” he snapped, standing over him, and Duny, on hands and knees on the ground, panting, would push himself up and go at it again.

It took six months for Vesemir to get through all of the basic signs with the whole trainee group, and then Geralt got back his afternoons with Duny, and the mornings, too: Vesemir separated them from the rest and had them square off and fight signs against swords. In the mornings, Duny used signs and Geralt swords, and in the afternoons they had to switch. It made Geralt get better at dodging like nothing else had: Duny was deadly quick with the signs, and when you’d been flattened with _Aard_ you couldn’t do damn much of anything until the ringing left your ears.

After another couple of months, Vesemir threw Lambert in with them, too: he had gotten maybe a bit better at signs than Geralt—he was absolutely frantic to be better at _something_ than Geralt—and he was doing a good job of mixing fighting and signs. Soon Vesemir cut them loose and told them to use whatever worked best, and all three of them started to get better, fast. They were all growing like weeds, starving all the time and eating massive amounts; Geralt could barely keep weight on no matter how much he piled on his plate, and Lambert wasn’t a lot better off.

“Don’t worry,” Vesemir said. “You’ll get your height first, and the bulk after,” and then he frowned at Duny, who was already piling muscle onto his shoulders and arms, and _not_ getting taller as quickly. “Unless you’ve got _elven blood_ ,” Vesemir added pointedly, “in which case chances are you’ll get it all bit by bit until you’re thirty.”

Duny didn’t so much as bat an eye, but that night Geralt waited until after dark and then asked him, “ _Are_ you half-elven?” Duny would sometimes say things in the dark that the next day he’d pretend he hadn’t said.

“No,” Duny said, firmly. Geralt frowned at the ceiling. Then Duny added after a moment, “But there is elven blood in my lineage.”

Geralt bit his lip, and then dared to ask, “Is—is that why you—why your family were—”

“What?” Duny said, sounding sincerely confused, which baffled Geralt: everyone knew that people hated elves, tried to kill them sometimes— “No, of course not,” Duny said, after Geralt explained. “I am not a—” He stopped and there was a faint creak that meant he’d turned on his side in bed and wasn’t going to say another word.

It drove Geralt mad. Duny wasn’t a _what?_ He couldn’t for the life of him figure out what to fill in the blank with, and any time he even hinted at asking more, Duny instantly turned into a mollusc, sure sign he’d said more than he meant to. Geralt sighed. He wasn’t sure he _liked_ Duny, exactly, but Duny was still his best friend, which didn’t make much sense but was true anyway, and it was maddening to always have that wall of silence between them.

One morning at practice, a few months after that, Duny abruptly said to Vesemir, “Eskel should be training with us.”

“What’s that?” Vesemir said, frowning at him.

“Eskel,” Duny repeated. Vesemir automatically glanced over at the other boys, and Geralt looked too: he hadn’t really noticed Eskel much. Reasonably nice, calm, ordinary, he would’ve said. “You neglect him because he is only moderately good at signs and moderately good at swords. But he is the steadiest and the most sensible. In actual combat, he will not forget what he has learned.”

Vesemir gave Duny a speechless glare, and Geralt winced, but three days later, Eskel ended up in with them, and Geralt got what Duny meant. Eskel was like a boat with a good load of ballast; you could annoy him, but it was almost impossible to really get him angry or throw him off his stride. Lambert tried. Eskel just stayed _level_.

There wasn’t a lot of jealousy about their separate group, because Vesemir piled extra chores on them on top of the extra training, like he was making them pay for his time: one day it was “Go fix the mountain trail, it’s been half rained-out,” and another it was, “Go help Master Elstrid in the kitchens,” and they had to spend hours stewing horrible potions for him, and sometimes it was, “Read this six hundred page book and write me a ten-page summary,” and then he frowned at Duny and added, “No _more_ than ten pages, and no helping any of the others.”

“I would not,” Duny said, and he meant it, even though he’d write papers for any of the other boys who weren’t in their group, just for an extra roll of bread or some dried fruit and nuts—he was a fiend for those; he’d wait until dinner was over to take the last few left in the serving bowls. But when Geralt stumbled in late from chopping four trees into kindling on Vesemir’s orders—they hadn’t been _little_ trees, either—and fell on his bed and groaned and said, “Duny, I haven’t had a chance to read—”

“No,” Duny said, without even letting him get any further. “Do it now.”

Geralt sat up indignantly. It wasn’t like he asked all the time. It was the one time he _had_ asked, actually. “If I give you a spare roll?” he said sarcastically.

Duny didn’t look up from his own book. “Not for two roast pheasant and a bottle of the ’24 Ghislain.” Geralt had no idea what the ’24 Ghislain was, but Duny made it sound pretty great. He stared at Duny, who finally looked up. “Geralt, what will you do the first time you meet a fleder?” 

“Uh,” Geralt said blankly. He vaguely thought a fleder was some kind of vampire. “Take Black Blood?”

“Read that book,” Duny said, and went back to his own. Geralt slowly picked up his book, annoyed and warmed-through, all at once.

They were all man height by the time the winter crowd arrived again. A varying bunch of witchers came back in every year, like migrating birds coming home to nest: nine of them this year. They hadn’t really had much contact with the trainees in previous years, but after their afternoon session, Duny announced, “I will go and observe exercise after dinner tonight.” That wasn’t exactly an invitation, but after they ate, Geralt and Eskel and even Lambert followed him to the library and out onto its balcony, with a good view of the back courtyard. Watching witchers at their peak sparring was intimidating: they were so much _faster_ , so much _better_ , than what Geralt had started to think was pretty good.

None of the witchers seemed to notice them, but the next day, Orthin of Lauderic clouted Geralt on the shoulder at lunchtime and said, “We hear great things about you, White Wolf. Come down tonight, instead of spying from the balcony. We’ll go a few rounds,” and Geralt swallowed as Orthin sauntered away smirking.

Duny watched him go narrow-eyed. “He intends to beat you badly.”

“Aren’t _you_ the little ray of sunshine,” Lambert said, and clapped a hand on Geralt’s shoulder. “Go on and kick the bastard’s ass, _White Wolf_.”

“Orthin is a trained witcher with thirty years’ experience and fresh in from the Path,” Duny said impatiently. “Against a half-grown stripling? Of course he is going to win; what I mean is that he intends to _hurt_ you. He means to give you a severe scar, if not maim you, and to make you uncertain and hesitant in battle. He wants to be the ruin of you.”

Geralt gulped. “What? _Why?_ ”

Duny shrugged. “Because he takes pleasure in cruelty, because he desires to reduce his future competition on the Path—what does it matter? You cannot fight him.” He was silent a moment, visibly thinking in the way they’d all learned meant he was about to come out with something you didn’t want to miss, whether he’d spotted a weakness in your technique or he’d somehow figured out that the kitchen was making pies and if they snuck past the cooling window they could steal one and all feast on it together. “We must alter the terms of the engagement,” he said finally.

“What do you mean, _we?_ ” Lambert said.

“Shut up, Lambert,” Eskel said, shoving him.

Duny just ignored him. “When you go to the back courtyard tonight, you will tell Orthin that the rest of your year-mates wish to observe, and ask him and any of the other witchers who wish to watch to come out to the training courtyard,” he told Geralt. “And then we will ambush them.”

“Uh, is that really a good—” Eskel began.

“Not with weapons,” Duny said. “With snowballs. They cannot draw blades to answer a group of youths pelting them with snow, nor seek vengeance for it afterwards.”

“Five seconds ago they were grown-ass witchers ‘fresh from the Path,’ ooo,” Lambert said. “Now you think we’re going to trash them in a snowball fight?”

“Certainly,” Duny said. “A _battle_ is not a single combat. Preparation and well-chosen ground counts for far more than the individual strength of warriors. Come.”

They all still got an hour after lunch to themselves—badly needed for digesting purposes—but today Duny called all the trainees together into the hallway between their rooms and sketched out a rough plan of action that started with them all using _Igni_ a lot during the first half of afternoon practice and hitting the snow to melt it, so there would be a nice layer of ice all over the ground, and then spending the second half using _Aard_ to cover it back up with snow.

“Put ice grips on your shoes directly after dinner, and go out to the back,” Duny said. “We will make snowballs and two fortifications: the first one merely of snow, and fairly weak, placed over one of the most thoroughly iced points. We will let them overrun that one, and abandon it quickly, at which point we will attack them from the far more secure second fortification, built with a foundation of small barrels, where we will have stored our ammunition.”

“It’s just _snowballs_ , though,” Morgan said. “It’s not like they can’t just keep coming after us. They’ll want to give us an awful beating if we pull this on them.”

There were more than a few faces agreeing with him, but Duny only nodded and said, “Yes. We must give them an incentive to give up and go inside. Therefore, once the battle has gone on long enough for them to be wet and uncomfortable, we will knock them over one at a time and remove one or both of their boots. Some of us will wait inside the castle at the front balcony, and we will throw the boots up to them to be hidden inside. I doubt even witchers will have much taste for standing barefoot in the snow for long.”

Half the boys giggled a bit nervously, but no one else argued while Duny laid out the handful of other tactics they would use. Geralt felt more than a little nervous himself the next day though, going out to the back courtyard; Orthin was laughing with a handful of other witchers, looming men with gruesomely scarred faces and limbs, in well-worn armor, and easily turning a sword in his hands. He turned smirking when Geralt came out. “Where’s your sword, White Wolf?” he said, a jeer in his voice.

Geralt cleared his throat and said, “My friends asked if we could fight in the front courtyard. They wanted to watch.”

“Oh, ho, all the baby witchers want to see?” Orthin said. “Why not. Lukas, Benoit?” A handful of other witchers followed him, too, six of them all told, and Orthin slung his arm around Geralt’s neck as they walked. “I bet you think you’re pretty good,” he said softly, in a gentle tone. “There was a fellow like you in my year, you know. Extra mutagens, fast as lightning, smash you to the ground before you knew what hit you. He got eaten by a wyvern down in southern Redania, two years out. That’s all it takes. You just meet something a little more dangerous than you are, and _boom_.”

He raised his other hand and made an exploding gesture, just as they all cleared the entrance and came into the courtyard with the two lumpy snow fortifications waiting. A forest of heads sprouted from the front fort, and four snowballs smacked Orthin dead-on in the face as Geralt dived forward, rolling clear. He dashed for the first fort, skidding himself on the ice under the snow, but Duny was there, handing him a pair of ice grips to pull on. The witchers were yelling and the battle was fully joined.

They fired snowball after snowball from the fort, and then Geralt sortied out with Eskel and Lambert to go round and hit the witchers from the back before a fresh volley came from the fort. It turned the witchers around three full times before they realized what was happening, and then they grouped up and charged the fortification all together, looking absolutely furious and already covered head-to-toe with snow.

Duny and the rest instantly retreated in a tight knot, firing snowballs steadily as the witchers bashed their way through the heavy wet snow of the wall, only to start sliding around wildly on the bare ice beneath, freshly slick: Duny had just melted a bit of the top layer to make it smooth as glass. Geralt and Lambert and Eskel dashed back together and rejoined the rest of the boys behind the heavier fort, and they started pounding all six of the witchers over and over with snowballs in a steady round, half the trainees working frantically to pack fresh snowballs as fast as they were sending them.

“Geralt! That one, on the left: run him off if you can,” Duny said, pointing as one of the witchers, the one Orthin had called Lukas, skidded away from the others and left himself exposed. Geralt dashed out with Lambert, each of them with an armful of snowballs, and they promptly pelted Lukas unmercifully all the way out of the courtyard into the back passage back to the fortress, and then abandoned the pursuit and fled back. Duny had suggested that if they could just get some of the witchers out of sight of the fight, they might decide they’d had enough of being hit by snowballs and just go back in to the nice warm fire, and indeed Lukas didn’t make a reappearance.

But as Geralt was dashing back for the fort, he went flying face-first abruptly, and in a moment he was hauled up choking by the collar: Orthin had slid across the clearing and tripped him up, and his face under a coating of snow was contorted with fury. “You think this is a _joke?_ ” he snarled, and slammed a fist to Geralt’s face. Geralt just managed to block it, then slung an arm around Orthin’s neck and kicked his knee out from under him, remembering what Duny had said: _If any of them get hold of you, get them to the ground and keep them there if you can, make yourself dead weight and let help come to you_.

Orthin got his feet back three times in the space of three seconds: it was all Geralt could do to keep him from getting completely back up for long, and he took several ear-ringing blows to the head before suddenly they were both hit together by seven trainees all yelling at the top of their lungs and piling bodily onto them both and dumping an entire caskload of snow over Orthin’s head. Another one yanked off Orthin’s left boot and threw it over the fortification to another, who ran off with them—Geralt shook himself dazedly out of the snow and saw all the remaining witchers had lost one of their boots, which were being tossed to trainees hanging out of upstairs windows of the castle and disappearing within.

The other witchers went running inside yelling up for their boots, but Orthin heaved off the load of trainees sitting on him, his face a snarling mask, blood trickling from his nose, and his steel sword came hissing out of its sheath. He swung it in a wildly humming circle, sending everyone diving for cover away from him, and then whirled on Geralt.

But Lambert was there, pressing Geralt’s own sword into his hand, and Eskel and Morgan flanking him also, and _everyone_ : all the other trainees had grabbed long rakes out of the stables—Duny had piled them next to the field—and were encircling Orthin together. He turned in a circle, seeing himself penned in, and rage clenched his face like a fist. Geralt pulled on a quick _Quen_ and raised his sword into parrying position, grimly taking a step forward; he wasn’t going to let Orthin hurt any of the others—

“What in the ever-burning nine hells is going _on_ here?” Vesemir bellowed, bursting into the courtyard like a sudden thunderstorm. “All of you, put those damn things down. Orthin, are you out of your _mind?_ This is a training ground, not a ploughing battlefield!”

Orthin jerked and stared at Vesemir, panting and bloodshot, trembling slightly. Geralt didn’t move out of parry position, and none of the others lowered their weapons either, not until Orthin slowly brought down his sword. Vesemir was frowning, looking around, and he looked at Geralt and demanded, “Well? What happened here?”

“We had a snowball fight with some of the senior witchers, Master Vesemir,” Duny said, straight-faced. “I am afraid we became excessively enthusiastic, and roused Master Orthin’s temper. We apologize.” He bowed to Orthin, formally, who just glared back at him speechlessly.

Vesemir stared hard at Duny, then looked around the courtyard. He went over to the second fort and kicked snow off one of the casks, exposing it. He pushed on it with his foot, feeling its weight—it’d been filled with sand and dirt. He turned round, saw the first demolished fortification line, then turned back and slowly looked all of them over, the circle of boys still standing tense with their rakes. “And whose _idea_ was this snowball fight?” he said, in a low, dangerous voice.

“Mine,” Geralt said, just at the same time as Duny said it.

Vesemir glared at them both. “Both of you, my office. _Now_.”

That brought Orthin’s sword back up, and the fire in his eye. “I am not _done_ with that insolent whelp—”

“Like _hell_ you aren’t,” Vesemir said. “Put your sword away and go inside. You’re leaving tomorrow. You pulled steel on a pack of trainees because they beat you in a snowball fight? Find someplace else to winter from now on.” Then he looked back at Geralt and Duny and jerked his head towards the fortress. “I said _now_.”

#

Geralt hunched a bit in the chair across from Vesemir’s desk. Duny was sitting the same ramrod-straight way he always did, his face perfectly calm. Vesemir came in and slammed the door shut behind him before he thumped heavily down into his chair. “One hell of a snowball fight,” he said flatly. “Fortifications, prepared terrain, polearms. Don’t know I was fair to Orthin, telling him it wasn’t a battlefield. Looked a hell of a lot like one. Where did you get the idea for the decoy front wall?”

Geralt stared at him, helplessly, but Duny said, “The Battle of Demerre Fields.”

“Right,” Vesemir said grimly. “But you didn’t read _The Graceful Victory_ in this library. Hasn’t even been translated into Common. What half-grown child gets handed Malthus in the original Nilfgaardian? What’s your name?”

Duny said nothing. He could’ve been a statue, unmoving. Vesemir’s jaw tightened, and abruptly he stood and flared an _Axii_ symbol into the air, incandescently bright; it shot across the room and slammed into Duny’s head, tipping it back with a gasp.

“ _Tell me your damn name,_ ” Vesemir snapped, and Duny’s mouth worked hard, shaping some sound, but before it could make it out of his throat, he jerked his chin back down and grated out harshly, “ _Duny_.”

Vesemir glared at him, face purpling. “I ought to sling you out a window with a noose around your neck right now,” he snapped. “If you think I’m going to let you build a witcher squadron out of my boys to avenge whatever damned family quarrel you think matters more than killing monsters—”

“Four men does not make a squadron,” Duny said flatly, interrupting him, and Vesemir paused. “Are we to carry on the pretense in here? None of the others are going to survive. You already know it.”

Geralt jerked, and looked at Vesemir for a denial, anything, but the old witcher was just looking at Duny from under a heavy furrow, his mouth downturned. After a moment, he said, “Morgan and Gavros—”

“Gavros still cannot cast _Yrden_ ,” Duny said. “His channel to magic has not fully opened. He may survive the final trial, but the first spectral horror he meets will slay him. And Morgan has begun complaining of a pain in his stomach after most meals. The mutagens do not only kill quickly, do they?” Vesemir looked even more bleak. He didn’t deny it. Duny nodded. “None of the rest will even last so long. If you meant to save their lives, you would send them away now, to become notable warriors in the service of some king. But you will not.”

Vesemir was slumping back into his chair, running a hand over his face, pulling it long as putty. “Damned whelp,” he muttered.

“Why _not?_ ” Geralt said loudly, his heart pounding. Morgan _dying_ —Gavros—Rondel, Warwick— _all_ of them? “Why _not_ send them away! If they’re not going to make it, if you _know_ they aren’t going to make it—”

“Witchers must be neutral!” Vesemir bellowed at him, and thumped a hard angry fist down on the table, making everything on it jump. “What the hell do you think would happen if this school started sending failed witchers to the army of Kaedwen, each one of them worth a hundred ordinary soldiers, each one a potential assassin or siege-breaker? How soon before Redania stopped letting witchers from the Wolf School across their borders? How soon before the king of Kaedwen began to send us a thousand boys each year to put through the Trial of the Grasses, so he could get back a battalion’s worth of survivors?” He sank back like a deflating bag and heaved a deep sigh out of his belly. “Witchers may not be soldiers,” he said. “Not twelve of them, not four of them.” He stared at Duny hard and flat. “Not _one_ of them. _Witchers must be neutral._ ”

Duny just sat there perfectly still, saying nothing, and Vesemir’s jaw clenched. “You’ll take the empty chamber at the top of the south tower,” he said to Duny tightly. “You’ll take your meals in your rooms and exercise alone, in the back courtyard. You’ll have to manage your own training, for that matter. I’m done giving you anything you can use. I catch you so much as _talking_ to one of the other boys, I’ll put a sword to your neck myself. When the time for the Trial of the Medallion comes, you’ll go alone. Don’t care if you don’t make it. Understood?”

Duny inclined his head, still silently, and Vesemir jerked his hand at them. “Get the hell out of here,” he growled, and Geralt shakily got back up and followed Duny out. He kept following, automatically, all the way to their room, where Duny started calmly and silently packing up his things, and Geralt grabbed him by the arm and jerked him around. “Duny!” he said, helplessly.

Duny stood still under his hands, his face cold and stern, familiar, as if he didn’t care he’d just been handed the next thing to a death sentence, sent off to teach _himself_ —and all because he’d saved Geralt’s _life_ — “I’ll show you what we learn,” Geralt said abruptly. “I can make it up to your room at night. I’ll climb the tower—”

“And when you are caught, I will be put to death, and very likely you with me,” Duny said. “No. I will manage.”

“I’ll go with you in the Trial of the Medallion,” Geralt said. “You won’t have to go alone—”

“He will send us at different times,” Duny said.

“I’ll—”

“Geralt,” Duny said, and Geralt snarled wordlessly and dragged him in and kissed him, and after a moment Duny was grabbing back at him wildly, yanking at his clothes still wet and stained from his bloody nose and splattered with mud from the churned ground under the snow, and Geralt heaved his shirt off over his head and shoved down his trousers and fell onto the bed with Duny still kicking his way out of his boots and getting them off the rest of the way. They tangled desperately, kissing and groping and humping at each other, clumsy with want, until Duny shut his eyes and let his head fall back a moment, breathing deeply, and Geralt gulped a breath and let his body manage things for him, getting their hips aligned and rocking into the hand Duny curled around their cocks, both of them groaning softly with how _good_ it felt, the tender skin and all that heat and hardness underneath it, blood pulsing through.

“This is exceptionally stupid,” Duny said, in a calm level tone, without pausing for even a second, which somehow made Geralt’s whole brain _shiver_ with lust, that Duny couldn’t _stop_ himself, and he buried his head against the pillow and sucked kisses all over Duny’s throat, behind his ear, until Duny gave a choked gasping strangled noise and _came_ , his cock jerking in tiny movements and spilling hot and wet all over Geralt’s, oh, _oh_ , and he came in a shocking rush too, all over them both.

Afterwards, they lay panting together for a while, and then Geralt said, “I’ll climb up on Thursdays.”

“Yes, very well,” Duny said.

#

It worked out reasonably well. They did get caught, a month in, but it was in the late evening: Vesemir stormed into the room snarling, “What did I tell you about training with,” and stopped short in enormous dismay. Geralt stared back in equal horror: he was on his hands and knees and Duny had just gotten _inside_ him, for the first time, they’d never managed it before—

Vesemir closed his eyes and said in deep resignation, “Why am I even goddamn surprised by anything at this point,” and turned around and went back out. He got Geralt in his office the next morning and yelled at him about witcher neutrality some more, and then got really mad when Geralt just nodded along, and cracked him hard across the face, so fast Geralt couldn’t dodge. “Do you goddamn understand—”

“It’s not politics to want revenge because somebody murdered your father!” Geralt yelled at him, wincing with a hand over his face.

Vesemir paused. “He’s told you that’s what he’s after?”

“No,” Geralt said sullenly. “I figured it out.” He was already sorry he’d said anything. If Duny found out, he was going to be enraged, and that was a lot worse than Vesemir being enraged.

After a moment, Vesemir sighed and said, gone weary instead of furious, “And if it turns out it _is_ politics? What if some king ordered his father put to death? You going to become a kingslayer with him? Start a war or two, kill a whole lot of fathers to get blood for his? Won’t bring him back.”

“I don’t know,” Geralt said, because he had no idea. “He hasn’t _asked_ me to.”

Vesemir groaned faintly. “Are you trying to get points for honesty? Oh, go get him back down; what’s the damn point even.”

“He just said there was no point,” Geralt said evasively, when Duny asked why Vesemir had changed his mind, and busied himself packing up Duny’s handful of things when Duny eyed him narrowly.

“Hm,” Duny said, but let it drop.

#

And one month after that—they were out on the Path. Vesemir told them all he’d give them a week’s warning before the Trial of the Medallion, and then he woke them up at dawn two days later and sent them out right away instead with whatever gear they had ready to hand, no chance to pack or practice. He met the survivors outside the gates as they straggled back, their hard-won wolf medallions heavy and cold on their chests: Geralt and Duny and Eskel and Lambert and Gavros; they were the only ones left, spattered with dust and blood. There was a pile of dripping waterbags and a small sack of dried rations waiting by Vesemir’s feet. They all fell on them, grabbing dry oat bars and wolfing them down, gulping thirstily; they were all starving except Duny. He’d had a full waterbag and a big stash of dried fruit and nuts under his bed next to his sword.

“Where the fuck did you get all of that?” Lambert had snarled at him, watching him munch as they’d gone walking warily down the mountain trail towards the ford that led to the trial grounds. “And how’d you know he’d send us out without any warning?”

“I didn’t,” Duny said. “The waterbag was discarded by one of the wintering witchers six months ago; the fruit and nuts are from the table leavings. I have been keeping the supplies on hand for months.” He hadn’t offered to share. Geralt himself had a roll of bread that he’d saved from dinner—he woke up at dawn most days, and the time until breakfast was a painful wait for his rumbling stomach—but most of the others didn’t have a thing. To be fair, a small sack of fruit and nuts shared out over twelve boys wasn’t enough to give any of them more than a mouthful, Geralt had told himself, but he’d known that wasn’t why Duny hadn’t shared. Duny hadn’t shared because he’d known most of them were going to die anyway, and he wasn’t going to waste the food on them pretending otherwise when putting it in his own belly meant the strength for one extra Sign that might make all the difference. And he’d been right. Now there were only the five of them left. Geralt avoided looking at Gavros, trying not to see thin spectral hands wrapped around his throat.

“You don’t get back through these gates before the first of Yule,” Vesemir said, standing over them. “You’re witchers now. You feed yourself with your swords, or you don’t eat. I don’t want to hear about any of you taking a contract closer than Ard Carreigh this year. And you walk the Path alone, not in a gaggle. You leave one at a time, two hours apart. You first,” he told Duny, who nodded and picked up one of the waterbags and the last ration bar and set off down the road without a word. A thin cloud of dust clung to his heels, settling slower than he walked, and soon he vanished into it, past where even Geralt’s eyes could follow.

Vesemir kept Geralt until last. Dusk was already falling. The road was dry and hard, and by the time he took it, four different witchers wearing mostly identical boots had all gone the same way for most of it, and all the gods forbid Duny might have waited for him. When Geralt got to the footbridge at the base of the mountain, he wrapped his cloak around him and tucked himself inside a soft hollow at the base of a tree. It didn’t feel too strange being outside the walls: this past month all of them had been sent out on week-long herb gathering trips, and they’d been doing overnights for a long time.

With the next morning’s light, he found Duny’s footprints in a soft bit of road on the other side of the bridge. He tracked them over the next two days all the way to a cave in the foothills near a village outside Ard Carreigh. Duny was standing in the mouth of the cave; it was full of small cracked bones and sticks and a few scattered quills like something that had come off a giant porcupine. He didn’t seem particularly surprised to see Geralt.

“You’re too close to have taken a contract yet,” Geralt said, kneeling down to look at the quills. They didn’t match anything he’d seen in any of the witcher texts that Vesemir had made them study. “What did these come from?”

“Me,” Duny said. He stepped deeper into the cave, all the way to the back, and used _Aard_ to shove over a boulder tucked into a corner. He bent down and picked up something small off the ground—a ring, Geralt realized, catching a gleam of gold and the flash of a polished black gem. Duny pulled off his right gauntlet and put it on, then put the gauntlet back on top. He came back to the front of the cave. “Let us go. I have no fond memories of this place.”

“How did you even end up here?” Geralt asked, as they walked away, hoping maybe he’d get a bit more of the story.

But Duny only shrugged a little. “I have only scattered memories from my time in the wilds.” And he left it there, with a finality that Geralt wasn’t going to try and overcome just now. They weren’t behind the walls of Kaer Morhen anymore, Duny could just up and vanish anytime he wanted. It felt like stalking some dangerous and shy beast that had to be carefully tracked to keep from spooking it off.

They traveled the rest of the way to Ard Carreigh together, and there Geralt discovered that his bleached-white hair was a significant asset: people called him “Master Witcher” and assumed he was fifty or something instead of a seventeen year old fresh off the mountain. Several of them commented on how well preserved he was. Meanwhile Duny got patronized and even called “boy” a couple of times like people thought he was Geralt’s apprentice or something. The Trials and the training had left lines and scars on all of them, but Duny had taken fewer than most, tucked behind his massively powerful Quen shield, and his face still had a youthful look. He didn’t complain about it outright, but he pressed his lips together in irritation.

“Why don’t I get us a contract?” Geralt offered. Duny didn’t object. The barkeep downstairs pointed him to a jewel-merchant traveling to Vizima looking for someone to escort him past the very many hazards of the road. It wasn’t the heroic contract of song and story, but Vesemir had kept up an almost endless scornful tirade against those songs and stories through their entire training.

“You’re ploughing witchers, not namby-pamby knights-errant out of Toussaint,” he’d growled. “Worry about making a living and let the troubadours manage the songs. If you live to see thirty, you’ll make it into one or two.”  

The jewel-merchant was happy to pay for two witchers, although he demanded to see Duny’s amulet to prove he really was one. “How old are you?” the merchant added suspiciously. “Are you even of age?”

“The Trial of the Medallion confers the legal status of both adulthood and mastery in every nation on the Continent,” Duny said coldly.

The merchant grunted. “All right, we leave tomorrow morn.” But Duny was still frowning as they walked away.

The merchant stopped complaining a week later when some ghouls attacked their camp on the road through Redania and Duny sent three of them flying with a single Aard spell. The rest of the trip was mostly uneventful: a few brigands tried them along the way, but Geralt’s sword and Duny’s Axii spells persuaded them to back off, and they handled four drowners by the Pontar without a hitch.

Temeria looked promising. Geralt glanced over the noticeboards along the way to Vizima and spotted at least two dozen open contracts. The School of the Bear and the School of the Cat were dwindling, and neither of them had graduated new witchers in decades, which meant not much competition in the area. The farms were orderly and prosperous, and there were fewer kids who shied rocks at witchers than in Redania. “Nice place,” Geralt said to Duny, casually, in the taproom of a local pub. “Plenty of contracts. Might be worth sticking around a while.”

Duny was looking down the length of the table at the window. Nobody had tried to chase them, which rated “nice place” in Geralt’s book, but the barkeep _had_ pointedly hinted them to the drafty back of the inn, and it was pitch black outside, so the only thing Geralt could see was their reflections looking back at them.

“Perhaps,” Duny said, studying his own face. “For a time.”

They found rooms in the elven quarter of Vizima where nobody bothered them—renting rooms was Duny’s idea, but Geralt enthusiastically supported the idea. It was worth his half of the cheap rent to know there was someplace he could be pretty sure of tracking Duny down, eventually. There weren’t that many jobs that called for two witchers, or at least not ones that paid enough for two witchers to eat, so most of the time they had to work separately.

Geralt started to accumulate other friends almost as soon as they’d settled in—a bard named Dandelion who was about to get strung up by three angry brothers of a girl he’d talked into bed, and a smith named Zoltan who lived down the street and didn’t look down his nose at patching a witcher’s armor. He even gave you a discount if you brought him a cask of good ale. Within a few months Geralt also developed a close working relationship with most of the healers at the Temple of Melitele: he laid a batch of unquiet spirits they asked him to go after, and after that they were happy to patch him up when he needed it. He got in some friendly harmless flirting along the way, and the younger women got in some friendly harmless groping. He did have to coax them into curing Duny when an ugly cockatrice wound he’d picked up started to fester. Duny had been made largely unwelcome in the Temple himself by then, after he’d gotten into a fairly sharp argument with Mother Nenneke about “the use of the cult of Melitele as an opiate for the grotesquely downtrodden masses and an absolution for their incompetent masters,” which Geralt privately felt she was upset about mostly because Duny had more or less won.

That being fairly typical, Duny did _not_ accumulate friends. Geralt thought he just holed up in their rooms when he wasn’t out working, buried in the books he spent every spare coin on, but near the tail end of their first year, it turned out he _had_ been getting out once in a while, because they were coming home from dinner in the local tavern when Duny unexpectedly paused and said, “That is Elder Varnerius. This could turn ugly.”

“Who?” Geralt said blankly. Duny had to be talking about the gang of Blue Stripes soldiers who had cornered a grey-haired and stern-faced elven man on the block ahead of them, but how Duny had any idea who the man was, Geralt didn’t know; the elves tolerated them and took their money, but they never _talked_ if they could help it.

Duny was still standing and frowning, watching the soldiers. It looked like a pretty typical round of nonhuman bullying. Geralt always got pissed off about it, but he also had learned his lesson after a couple times trying to intervene. It rarely ended well, and this time it wasn’t just some gang of toughs: those were soldiers, eight of them, with a man who looked like an officer to boot. “You want to try and stop them?” Geralt said dubiously.

After a moment, Duny said abruptly, “Yes. Come, but don’t draw your sword unless I do.”

He strode over. As they went Geralt noticed women and small children were all vanishing off the street, and a lot of young male elves with clothes loose enough to conceal illegal daggers in were hovering at the corners, watching the confrontation from a plausibly deniable distance, visibly tense. But Duny went right up to the soldiers and stopped maybe five feet away and just stared directly at the officer without saying a word. After a few minutes the man snapped, “Did you want something, boy?”

“To understand what you are doing,” Duny said. “Is there some purpose behind this harassment, or are you merely entertaining yourselves? You are an officer, which makes the latter less likely, but by no means impossible.”

The man turned an astonished look on him. “You have not been brought to my attention before now. I suggest you move along and keep it that way. I will not tolerate interference in our work. We are no threat to law-abiding citizens. We are pursuing Scoia’tael.”

“Indeed?” Duny said. “Recruiting for them, I would have said. This man is a respected elder.”

One of the soldiers wheeled around—a big man, several inches on Duny and plenty of muscle. That wouldn’t actually help him if it came to fighting, but he probably thought it would. “You deaf or something? Captain Roche just told you to move it along.”

Duny ignored the soldier and kept talking to Roche. “He is a father who has raised four children: that is most rare, among the elves, and respected. To stop and browbeat him in the street is an act of provocation.”

“Anybody here ask you to stick your nose in?” the soldier said, taking a step closer. “What are you even doing this part of town? You an elf-lover or something, slumming it?”

“We live on this street,” Duny said levelly, “and would prefer not to find ourselves in the midst of a riot. Well?” he asked Roche. “Is that your goal?”

Roche said coldly, “You are quick to defend a suspected Scoia’tael sympathizer.”

“Among that number you must count nine-tenths the populace of this quarter,” Duny said. “Why him, in particular? Because he goes often to the forest?”

“You are familiar with his activities?” Roche said sharply, and the elf himself stiffened.

“His youngest child is ill,” Duny said. “A wasting illness that makes it difficult for her to eat. A draught brewed from fresh-picked celandine and myrtle relieves the symptoms, but the herbs lose efficacy within two days, requiring frequent harvesting trips. It would not be unreasonable for you to suspect a man seen coming and going so often, but he is an unlikely spy.”

“It seems to me you have rather confirmed he goes regularly back and forth to the deep forest,” Roche said. “That makes him a very _likely_ spy.”

Duny shook his head in impatience. “Who would care for his children if he were caught? The Scoia’tael think of such matters more than human guerrillas would. They would not recruit a man with such responsibilities.”

“Seems like you know a whole lot about it,” the soldier put in. “Maybe we ought to spend some _effort_ on you, while we’re at it.”

Duny turned to look at him. “There is a line where a man begins to irritate me, and another at which I disembowel him. You have crossed the first. I suggest you cease looking for the second.”

The soldier snorted. “Oh, is that so? You’ll disembowel me, eh?”

“Or decapitate you, or char your body to ash,” Duny said, perfectly flat.  “As witchers, we have been trained in a variety of techniques, but I doubt I would have to resort to the more exotic in your case.” The soldiers all stiffened and put hands on their swords. Geralt grimly took a step in closer, reaching for the steel blade on his back, but Duny put out a hand to halt him, and didn’t draw his own.

“But I do _not_ seek to irritate _you_ ,” he told Roche. “Indeed, I would prefer to help you instead. I presume some specific incident has occurred to spur this inquiry. What is it? Surely the news of it cannot be concealed long.”

Roche had gone wary too, when Duny had said _witchers_ : Geralt was willing to bet he’d seen their kind fight before, so he knew what would happen if it came down to blades, even if his men didn’t. “A band of Scoia’tael raided a caravan on the road to Novigrad, two days ago,” Roche said after a moment. “There were passengers in the train: four gently born noble girls with their chaperones, going to make their debuts in Novigrad society. They were not found among the dead.”

Duny nodded. “Do you merely want to rattle the saber in revenge, or do you want them found?”

Roche glared at him.

Ten minutes later they had a contract to rescue the girls if they could, and the commandos had left, disgruntled. Elder Varnerius watched them go, then looked at Duny. It wasn’t a particularly grateful look. “We have not been introduced, and yet you seem to know a great deal of my affairs.”

Duny bowed and said something to him in what Geralt realized with some surprise had to be Elvish, making Varnerius’s eyes widen. Duny spoke it as smoothly as Common. “But if you will pardon me,” Duny went on, “my friend does not know the Elder Tongue. I know nothing of your business but what anyone might learn by incidental observation, and a little more knowledge of the Aen Sidhe than is common to Nordlings. I apologize if my intrusion was undesirable.”

Geralt wasn’t exactly sure how, but by the end of the whole affair, they ended up with much friendlier neighbors, a fat purse for returning the girls, and a grudging but nevertheless valuable connection with Roche, who it turned out wasn’t just some random officer, but the captain of King Foltest’s Blue Stripes commandos.

“But let me be very plain with you, witcher,” Roche said to Geralt, as he’d handed over the money. “My eye is on you now. If I ever learn that you know anything about the Scoia’tael and you haven’t told me—”

“We know a great deal about the Scoia’tael that we will not tell you,” Duny interrupted, from the other side of the desk. “We are not your spies or soldiers, and we do not report to you. And therein lies our value. Do you imagine you and your commandos, or any loyal soldier of your king, could have retrieved those girls as anything but corpses? I suggest you consult _him_ before you issue threats against witcher neutrality.”

Geralt figured that speech would land them on the run in the woods outside Vizima, if not in a prison cell, but instead Roche scowled furiously and said nothing more, and a week later called them in for another contract, to take out a grave hag preying on a military cemetery. “I didn’t expect him to come around,” Geralt said to Duny, who shrugged.

“He was ordered to,” Duny said, like he believed that King Foltest had any opinion about them personally, except after three more contracts over the next three months, each one progressively more complicated, Roche abruptly told them that they were being summoned to the palace for a royal audience.

Geralt was just starting to feel like he’d got the hang of being a witcher. The fights still gave him a glittering bright rush of adrenaline and satisfaction, but it came in lower down, was the best way he could put it. It didn’t get into his head and mess him up. He wasn’t proud when a job went well anymore. He only got mildly irritated when one of them went pear-shaped in some way. He knew what he was doing these days, and he liked the feeling. But he had no goddamn idea at all what you did at a royal audience, except to be sure he wasn’t going to do it right, whatever it was.

If Duny had any similar concerns, he didn’t let them show. He came home the night before with two fancy doublets in their sizes and made Geralt come to the bathhouse with him and get shaved clean, wrecking several months’ work on a beard even Zoltan had started approving. Then he taught Geralt how to make a formal bow.

“How the hell do _you_ know? Never mind,” Geralt added. “I know. Your father taught you.”

A flicker of something crossed Duny’s face too quick to really make out; a spasm of pain maybe. “No,” he said. “The one thing my father never taught me was how to bow.”

He _didn’t_ bow to Foltest, the next day, which Geralt only noticed halfway into his own. He pulled up in irritation and shot Duny a hard look, but Duny wasn’t looking at him. He was looking at Foltest instead, waiting. Foltest didn’t complain, just smiled at them both and invited them to sit at his table. He served them a hell of a good meal and thanked them for their service to the people of Temeria. He had yet another contract for them, this one to clear up a royal wyvern clutch up in the northern stretch of the Pontar, near Novigrad. “My garrison commander there will have more work for you, I am certain, and I will cover the cost of your passage back to Vizima,” Foltest finished, expectantly.

Geralt glanced back at Duny. They’d never been to Novigrad; it sounded like an interesting trip, and he liked Foltest, if that made any sense when you were talking about a king. Anyway, he was always happy for any job that involved the two of them working together. But there was an oddly familiar look in Duny’s face that Geralt couldn’t quite place, and it made him feel wary.

“You are generous, your Majesty,” was all Duny said, and abruptly Geralt recognized it: the look Duny got out in the field when he was considering how to kill something really dangerous.

“I believe in paying good men what they are worth, and making the best use of them I can,” Foltest said. And then he smiled suddenly, a real warmth coming into his eyes. “Of course you suspect me of wanting to suborn you. And so you should. I am not a fool. I have been observing your work for several months now. I would be delighted to have two witchers of your gifts as my loyal servants, and if ever you desire to abandon the Path, you will find a warm welcome in my court. But I have taken your words to Captain Roche to heart, Master Duny, and this is as much as I will say on the subject. You will hear no threats from me to your neutrality. So long as you choose to guard it steadfastly against all comers, I will never try to act against it.”

Duny accepted the contract, but as they walked out of the castle he was still frowning. When Geralt asked him what was wrong, he said, “He was telling the truth. He is not a fool.”

“That’s good, isn’t it?”

“It might one day prove inconvenient,” Duny said. Then his mouth twisted suddenly. “But for the moment, I suppose you are correct.”

They took the trip to the Pontar, killed the wyverns, and got paid; then they took the scales and wyvern livers over into Novigrad and sold them to an alchemist in Hierarch Square for almost as much gold again. Novigrad was an almost overwhelming experience. Geralt had thought Vizima was huge, but it could have fit into one small corner neighborhood. But Dandelion was in town, performing with an acting troupe, and he took them under his wing. He took them to all the dazzling sights, from the shining beauty of the Temple of the Eternal Flame to the massive dockyards to the galleries of art—exquisite works of glass and jewelry so tiny that Geralt could barely imagine how anyone had made them; massive sculptures and mechanisms that were equally baffling in the other direction, and all of it with equally astounding prices. Everywhere the city was full of people, people from every part of the world, all of them speaking in their own tongues.

Dandelion obviously enjoyed showing it off to his untutored witcher friends, except Duny, in tow, kept frustrating him horribly by not appearing particularly impressed by any of it, and once actually stealing his thunder. Dandelion took them to a bookstore and introduced them to the very snooty owner, who eyed their swords and battle-stained gear with disfavor. “My friends are master witchers and educated men, not brigands or common guards!” Dandelion said, puffing out his chest. “I have brought them here because I thought you might have a novel or two that would help them pass the weary nights on their Path. Master Duny, perhaps you would be interested in trying the _Lay of Leondine?_ ”

There hadn’t been an answer: Duny had already vanished upstairs. When they went up and found him deep in a book the size of a healthy crate of apples, the shopkeeper made a faint squawk and lurched towards him. “Master witcher! I beg you have a care. That book is most rare—surely not of interest—”

“On the contrary,” Duny said. “I am very interested: I did not believe any copies of Drovonishko’s economic treatise had survived his formal proscription. There are none in…any library I have ever seen. Where did you acquire it?” The two of them spent the next six hours talking and looking into dozens of books, several of them in languages Geralt hadn’t even _heard_ of. By the end of it, the shopkeeper almost had tears in his eyes. Duny came away with six hefty volumes for a very small price and the agreement that he’d bring them back and exchange them for others when he was done with them.

“I don’t understand, where is he even from?” Dandelion burst out to Geralt that evening, after Duny had excused himself early from the drinking to go upstairs with the book he hadn’t taken his nose out of all dinner. “And how did he end up a witcher? Or were _all_ of you tutored in the Toussaintois dialect and the Laith aen Undod?”

“His family were murdered,” Geralt said, leaving it there because he didn’t much like how little else he really knew. “They were rich, though.”

“Rich?” Dandelion said. “ _My_ family is rich, Geralt, but I didn’t get tutored in obscure dialects on the university level as a _child_.”

“He just really likes to read?” Geralt tried.

Dandelion threw up his hands. “You can’t just pick up languages by staring at words in a book. You’d have to hire—a dozen masters! More, probably. I can’t imagine the only thing they ever had him study was languages.”

“Uh,” Geralt said, and then abruptly he said, “He read something called _The Graceful Victory_ , do you know—”

“What, _Malthus?_ ” Dandelion stared at him. “Where the hell did he read _Malthus_?”

“I don’t know, at home?” Geralt said.

“No one has Malthus at home!” Dandelion said. “It’s forty-two volumes long.”

“Huh?” Geralt said. “What is it about?”

“Malthus was a Nilfgaardian soldier who came up through the ranks from private all the way to General of the Empire during the reign of Beddyn var Emreis and the conquest of Metinna,” Dandelion said. “He kept exhaustive journals his entire life—every battle he was in, tactical and strategic analysis, supply reports—when he retired he tidied them up a bit and presented them to the new emperor as a gift. He was ennobled for it. There are twenty volumes in the Oxenfurt University library, that’s the most of it that you can even find anywhere outside Nilfgaard. There’s only ever been seven full copies even made.”

“The Battle of Demerre Fields?” Geralt said. His heart was quickening like he was on a trail and he’d just found fresh marks, laid down recently; someone whispering _you’re getting closer_ in his ear. “Which one talks about the Battle of Demerre Fields?”

“Demerre Fields—Demerre Fields—” Dandelion got up and canvassed all his half-drunk friends and came back with the slightly uncertain opinion that Demerre Fields had been early in Malthus’s career. “I think that’s the one where he was field-promoted from sergeant to lieutenant, actually,” Dandelion said. “But the ones most people want to read are the later volumes, of course—the early ones are more tactical, but he’s really famous for his strategy.”

“How could Duny’s family get a copy of it?”

 “They couldn’t,” Dandelion said. “Geralt, you don’t understand, only serious historians and senior military officers ever read Malthus. Senior _Nilfgaardian_ military officers. Almost all the copies are in the Imperial Academy in the _city_ of Nilfgaard.”

“When they promote someone to general,” one of the other troubadours put in, groggily, “they’re allowed to take one volume home at a time. Remember? Like in The Madness of Merthyn?”

The Madness of Merthyn was a comical play about a bumbling Nilfgaardian officer who kept getting promoted from one disaster to another, and who barely escaped execution for losing a volume from the Academy. Geralt wasn’t completely sure he was ready to treat it as a trustworthy source—but at the same time, it all felt sharply, perfectly right, slotting together cleanly. _I’m not a—Nordling_ , the long-ago sentence finished belatedly inside his head. They didn’t look down on elves in Nilfgaard. Most of the nobility had elven blood in their lines. So Duny was from Nilfgaard—the son of some disgraced general, maybe.

Geralt left the drinking early himself and went upstairs. Duny was sitting in bed reading, and Geralt stood in the doorway watching him a moment, adding in more details: the strong jutting line of his straight nose, classic Nilfgaardian; the dark-as-night hair; the not-quite-pointed ears; the hard military carriage of his shoulders. Duny glanced up, then straightened and closed the book around his finger.

“Duny,” Geralt said, and stopped.

After a moment, Duny said, “I will not lie to you, Geralt. Nor will I refuse you any truth that you ask me for. Not anymore. But some questions cannot be asked without consequences.”

 _What’s your real name?_ _What happened to your father? Why was he executed? Why were you cursed?_ But after those came the inevitable next question: _what are you going to do about it?_ And once Duny told him—he would have to be in or out. There wouldn’t be a middle ground where his feet got to stay on the Path and he got to keep Duny in his bed. In his life.

Geralt had seen enough of the world by now to know that he didn’t want any part of politics. Foltest seemed about as good a king as you got to have—and the streets of Vizima were full of beggars and starving orphans and elves marked with bruises where stones had hit them. Dandelion had told him there had been a war five years ago, over a border dispute with Redania in the west, and a lot of boys had signed up to fight it, full of patriotic fervor. Now once a month the soldiers strung up a handful of veterans who’d gone brigand or thief because they couldn’t live ordinary lives anymore, and meanwhile, after six battles that killed more than three thousand men, the war had ended over a nice dinner where Foltest and the king of Redania had agreed to leave the five miles on either side of the border unmolested and everything had just gone back to the way it had been.

Geralt wasn’t going to waste his time being mad about it. But…he wasn’t going to make it worse, either. There weren’t a lot of witchers around anymore, so he’d ended up in a few fights with brigands and toughs, too ignorant to know or too desperate to care what the two swords meant. He’d seen what his sword and strength could do to an ordinary man. He didn’t like it. He felt deep in his gut that he was meant for something else. He was meant for those horrors in the depths of forest and sewer, meant to cut down things that preyed on ordinary humans. He was meant to _protect_ ordinary humans, not hurt them. Not even for vengeance.

And maybe he should’ve been angry that he’d been forced into this life, the way Lambert was, but…he wasn’t. It had happened so young he didn’t even remember the choice being made for him, and already he barely even remembered what it had been like before the Trial of the Grasses. He liked being strong and fast. He liked that getting hurt didn’t bother him very much. He liked the way nothing felt scary anymore, even when around him other men were puking in terror or horror or both. He liked the rush of satisfaction he got when he’d put a monster down, when he saved someone.

But he also liked Duny, whose clear cold still-grey eyes saw things that even golden witcher eyes couldn’t; who had never been afraid of anything at all, even when he should have been. Geralt wanted _inside_ , past that wall that Duny sometimes let him peek through for a moment. But he wasn’t sure he was ready to pay the blood toll to get through the gates.

“It’s early,” he said, instead. “Could I talk you into putting that book down for a while?”

A flicker crossed Duny’s face, regret and relief mingled. He closed the book all the way and set it aside. Geralt put down his swords and pulled his shirt off over his head and went to him.

#

They spent a few months working out of Novigrad, and then tried a circuit of the Skellige Isles, which got cut short. Geralt liked it a lot, and Duny hated it with a passion. “Uncouth and unreasonable,” Duny said, watching with cold disfavor as three men in bearskins wrestled in the middle of the floor of the Jarl of Undvik as the king and half a dozen other lords cheered lustily on.

The old druid sitting next to him—Duny had taken one of the warm places by a fire, although those were otherwise mostly full of bundled sleeping children and old men and women—snorted. “Ah, ye’ve ice water in yer blood, all ye Black Ones. What business have ye to turn yer nose up at a little honest bloodletting? Ye’d come here with fire and iron in yer hands to spill more of it, quick enough.” And then abruptly he turned on Duny and his face had gone strange and remote and his eyes staring. “And so shall ye come hither, if ye have yer deepest wish, and yet not yer heart’s desire.”

He jerked out of it and stared at Duny with a suddenly hard face. “Who be ye?” he demanded sharply. “Duny said ye; _of naught_ , it means, in yer tongue. Name yerself true.”

Duny stood up and slung his swords back over his shoulder. “Feadheain Fagail,” he said dryly— _the one that is leaving_ —and walked straight out of the hall. Geralt grabbed his own swords and made a dash after him. Duny barely agreed to wait for Geralt to run back to their room to get their packs before they headed down to the docks and got on the first boat they could talk into taking them back to Novigrad. It cost them all the coin they’d made in the Isles and a bit extra, and it was a small fishing boat with no crew, so they had to spend half the trip killing sirens and drowners to keep it from being dragged down. They didn’t talk about what had happened, or what the old man had said, but Geralt kept thinking about it. _Name yourself true_ , the old man had said. Vesemir had wanted to know that too: _what’s your name?_ Maybe that was the most dangerous question, after all.

“What about going back to Vizima?” Geralt asked Duny a little plaintively after they landed, as they shared the hard day-old loaf that was all their purses could stand, sitting in the main square waiting for the day to get moving so they could start asking around for a contract. Dandelion had left town, and it turned out Novigrad was a lot less fun when you didn’t have money in your pocket: the prices for rooms were astronomical, and you couldn’t even sleep rough without getting into a fight; the cartel of beggars handed out spots and enforced it.

“As you wish,” Duny said. They got a contract guarding a caravan and went back through Temeria and found their old rooms still vacant.

And then two solid years went by. Ordinarily, at least by witcher standards, with steady work and steady pay, and slowly Geralt half forgot about the mystery under the press of the everyday. There were no more mysterious incidents, except once in a while Duny would get restless and take a contract down to Cintra or Aedirn for a month or so. He’d tell Geralt he was going, though, and he came back when he said he would, so after the first couple of times, Geralt stopped even having to fight off the strong urge to track Duny down.

Geralt preferred to stick closer to home himself, which Vizima was slowly becoming. Roche and occasionally Foltest himself had enough work to keep him busy, with smaller contracts to fill in and around their jobs, and Geralt liked to see the countryside he’d already cleaned up as he rode on to new missions. Foltest kept his word; he didn’t make any other kinds of offers. Geralt actually opened a bank account, on Zoltan’s urging. He started to think maybe he had some kind of a real life worked out. He was— _happy,_ which seemed kind of nuts when he was riding back to Vizima with a cockatrice head hanging off his saddle, covered in blood, after four fights in four days before he’d managed to nail the damn thing. But he was whistling as he went, because Duny had gotten back from Cintra last week, and when Geralt got home, he knew Duny would look up from the table where he’d be reading, and he’d purse his mouth in distaste, and insist on taking Geralt to the baths at once, and Geralt was going to have enough coin in his pocket to pay for one of the private rooms.

Except when he did get home, Duny was sitting at the table with old Master Vesemir, who was passing through town on a contract of his own. Geralt regretfully went and scrubbed off alone in the public rooms, and they all ate dinner together at the Green Rose.

It was odd to sit with Vesemir as equals, as real witchers. Geralt realized to his surprise it had been almost four years since they’d left Kaer Morhen. “Good to see you both,” Vesemir said gruffly, shaking their hands when they parted. “I’ve been hearing well of you.” He glanced at Duny and added pointedly, “Glad to see you’ve got your feet planted on the Path.”

And that was when Duny said quietly, “On one that has not yet diverged.” 

“Don’t make me sorry I hauled you out of that cave,” Vesemir growled.

“You have charged me for that rescue already,” Duny said. “You told me I would have to come to Kaer Morhen and become a witcher: I have done so. I am not ungrateful,” he added, when Vesemir glared at him. “But I have other debts outstanding left to pay.”

It wasn’t anything new, anything Geralt didn’t already know, but something about it made him uneasy. As they walked home, he almost worked himself up to saying something, something mostly safe— _we have it pretty good these days, don’t we,_ maybe. But he didn’t get the chance. Duny turned on him without warning the second they came in the door. He pulled Geralt to the floor and had him right there, clothes barely off and his bare ass sitting on the cold floor, and then he dragged Geralt to the bedroom and did it _again_. “ _Duny,_ ” Geralt gasped, not a complaint, gripping the bedstand and groaning as Duny slammed back into him.

“ _Anwylion_ ,” Duny muttered past his ear, harsh and panting, and Geralt didn’t know what the word meant, but he had the sudden bright hard certainty that what it _really_ meant was _goodbye_ , that Duny did see his path splitting off, somewhere up ahead and not even all that far, and when that fork in the road came, he was going after his revenge, and it wasn’t going to matter shit to him if he was going to make himself and Geralt both miserable.

The next morning Geralt got up when Duny did and said, “Get us some breakfast, will you? I’ll be back in a little while,” pretending to be casual, and raced off to Roche’s office to ask him if he had anything he needed two witchers for. “No,” Roche said, and then abruptly said, “Wait. I know you will not take contracts against Scoia’tael, and you will not turn assassin. Would you serve as bodyguards, however?”

Turned out there was about to be a big meeting of all the Northern kings and Nilfgaardian envoys down on the southern border of Cintra and Nazair to discuss a major trade agreement that Nilfgaard was offering—with the strong hint that any Northern nation that refused was asking for a whole lot of Nilfgaardian company come the spring. “All parties have agreed to one company of men apiece,” Roche said. “But I distrust the Black Ones, and the Redanians only slightly less. The king refuses to let me conceal more men anywhere nearby. But he will not refuse to let me appoint the two of you as members of his personal guard.”

“I’ll talk to Duny,” Geralt said uneasily. He didn’t mind taking the job of keeping Foltest alive, but this felt exactly like the kind of slippery slope Vesemir had warned them about. There wasn’t much of an alternative, though: the noticeboard didn’t have anything except a small contract to kill a single measly drowner that had taken up residence in a pond on some farmer’s property just outside the city.

Duny listened to the job with a strange, remote expression, receding into the distance even as Geralt talked as fast as he could. Geralt half expected him to say no, to say he couldn’t, he had something else to do— But Duny only said, “So be it,” when Geralt finished, even though his expression still looked strange. “When do we leave?”

Geralt told him it would be three days. Duny nodded. “I will be here then.” He took his pack and left immediately, without another word.

Geralt spent the next three days killing the drowner and hanging out with Zoltan and Dandelion down at the Green Rose, wondering where Duny was with jealous anxiety. He wasn’t worried exactly, he’d gotten the reprieve he’d wanted; Duny would be back in time. But what the hell was Duny doing? There weren’t any other contracts in the area to be had.

Geralt was up before dawn the morning they were leaving, his pack ready, and he sat on the stoop of their house in the half-light, drinking coffee and waiting. It still wasn’t light when Duny came into sight down the road that led into the elven quarter from the gates. He was with Elder Varnerius. They stopped at the plaza and exchanged a few more quiet words. Then Duny inclined his head slightly, and Varnerius— _bowed_ , his hand over his heart; the way elves bowed to their own elders. They separated, and Duny turned towards the house, pausing for a brief moment when he caught sight of Geralt before he came on.

Geralt had a second mug of coffee waiting. He held it out. Duny took it and drank it. There was a tight knot in Geralt’s throat. “Duny,” he said, low. “Did—did Foltest have anything to do with—?”

Duny put down the empty mug and looked at him. “No.”

Geralt swallowed relief down hard and nodded. He stood up. “It’s time to go.”

“Yes,” Duny said.

#

The negotiations were being held in Cintra’s Fort Adelron, on the southern border. The accommodations weren’t fancy, and there were a lot of crowned heads to fit into them. Geralt and Duny ended up quartered in the stables with the rest of Foltest’s men. The Nilfgaardians got put in there too, because Roche asked them if they could keep the rest of the men from provoking a fight. “Yeah, sure,” Geralt said. He knew a lot of the Blue Stripes by now, and more to the point, they’d all seen him fight, that time last year when the drunk wizard had accidentally raised six wraiths out of the old cemetery in the middle of Vizima. None of them were going to argue with him.

The Nilfgaardians all looked pretty sour about being dragged north in winter. They mostly hunkered down sullenly around their smouldering campfire and barely bothered to post a watch; after a few days most of them were unshaven and unwashed. Duny watched them with hooded eyes, so disapproving that they noticed; their sergeant looked at him and snorted and said something to one of the others in Nilfgaardian.

Duny said something to _him_ , then, very softly, and the sergeant jerked his head round and stared, hand going to the hilt of his sword. He barked something at Duny, who only looked at him very directly, cold, and said nothing. The sergeant’s stare went uncertain, wavering, and he looked away. All the other Nilfgaardians were staring at Duny too. The next day, the sergeant started pushing the men back into line, elaborately casual, like it had nothing to do with anything Duny had said.

“What _did_ you say?” Geralt asked him. 

“I suggested he remember that the rusty blade sticks in its sheath,” Duny said. “It is one of the training maxims of the Nilfgaardian forces.”

“Seemed to set off quite the reaction,” Geralt said slowly. He didn’t see why it had, either.

Duny shrugged. “What one says is often not so important as how it is said. The Nilfgaardian tongue draws heavily from the Elder Speech, and the relative rank of speakers determines the fine details. I cannot easily translate for you the connotations of my particular conjugations and pronouns.” He looked at Geralt, though, and he wasn’t saying he _couldn’t_ or _wouldn’t_ , so Geralt could have asked. Instead he looked away, uneasily. He’d thought he was finding a detour, something to keep Duny on the Path with him for a while longer. It was starting to feel more like he’d brought Duny to the crossroads.

Geralt and Duny spent the negotiation sessions standing on either side of Foltest’s throne. The kings all had thrones, which had been wrestled into the room at great effort; seemed to Geralt they could’ve all just agreed to sit in ordinary chairs. It was mind-numbingly boring, at least in Geralt’s opinion, but Duny was watching and listening to all of it intently, and when they broke for lunch on the fourth day, he said to Foltest, “The negotiations are a sham.”

“What?” Foltest had been deep in thought, frowning; he jerked his head up and stared at Duny.

“Lord Ithnios is of House Reviand,” Duny said. “They are one of the ancient noble houses of the founding of Nilfgaard. Trade is beneath them: they send sons to the army, not the corporations. He makes no sense as an envoy for a trade negotiation; indeed, you must have seen he has already made three critical errors in the terms he offers.”

Roche had stopped to gawk outright for a moment, and before he could dive in to pull Duny up for having exceeded his place, Foltest said in a fascinated tone, “And those errors…?”

“The river rights along the Felissan, the toll rates on the Southern Highway, and most notably the tariffs on wheat,” Duny said. “If Nilfgaard truly allowed Redanian wheat to come south at a quarter-oren the bushel for any length of time, half the farmers of Metinna and Nazair would be ruined, and silver would go pouring northward. It is an exceptionally idiotic trade proposal. It is however an exceptionally effective way to keep Redania out of an invasion of Cintra next year. The Felissan rights are plainly meant as a similar temptation for you, and the lowered toll rates for Aedirn. But the Amell Mountains,” he gestured out the window, where they made a jagged line to the south, “form the true barrier between Nilfgaard and the North. If you all stand aside while Cintra falls, the rest of the North will lie open to almost inevitable conquest afterwards.”

Foltest’s mouth was curving slightly upwards. “Well, well, Master Duny,” he said. “It seems you are not always entirely neutral after all.”

“War makes a great deal of work for witchers,” Duny said. “We have enough of it at present.”

 Foltest nodded, a glint in his eye, and they spent all the breaks that day following him around the fort to the quarters of all the other Northern rulers, where he pressed them not to accept the Nilfgaardian terms hastily, no matter how appealing. Foltest wanted all the Northern kings to instead agree formally to a mutual defense of any Northern nation against invasion from the south. Redania and Aedirn didn’t like the idea of passing up the deal, but they also didn’t like the idea of being hoodwinked, and after Foltest had Duny lay out his arguments, they agreed to at least play hardball.

The main negotiations dragged for the next three days. When Temeria and Redania and Aedirn dug in their heels, the Nilfgaardian envoy started sweetening the deal even more—better terms, longer periods. Except that only made the Northerners all more suspicious, especially since in the secret meetings that were happening in dark corners of the castle, Duny kept pointing out in detail how bad those offers actually would be for Nilfgaard.

How Duny ended up being part of the conversation, Geralt wasn’t even sure. He wasn’t pushy about it, not that Geralt noticed, but somehow he always ended up standing quietly right at the edge of whatever table had been gathered around. He didn’t say much, but when he said anything, the kings _listened_ to him. At the secret before-breakfast meeting, the morning of the third day, Duny said, “I imagine today the envoy will offer to rescind the tolls on the Velena River crossings,” and that was exactly the offer that the Nilfgaardian envoy trotted out at breakfast not half an hour later. After that, the kings even started sending for him directly—first the king of Redania, then the king of Aedirn, calling him in for private meetings, like they wanted Duny’s _advice_. And Duny kept _giving_ it. He pointed out to them both that the Emperor wasn’t here to give his personal word—he’d left himself the power to disavow his envoy’s agreement. “And if he truly meant to treat with you as equal sovereigns, surely he _would_ have come, in his person,” he said, and the kings scowled and nodded along.

Geralt watched it with a belly full of uneasy roiling. Not that he was sorry that the Black Ones weren’t getting what they wanted, but he didn’t understand why Duny had gotten involved in the first place, and for that matter, he didn’t know what Duny was actually after. On the surface of it, he seemed to be doing his best to make sure Nilfgaard didn’t get their trade agreement, but—he _was_ Nilfgaardian, and he hadn’t gone Nordling or stopped giving a shit about his old country; he was still frowning at any of the Nilfgaardian privates in the barn who had so much as a spot on their jerkins, like he was disappointed in them for falling down on the job. So why the hell did he want to sabotage their trade agreement? He’d sure never given a damn how often Foltest’s soldiers bathed, and he had to sleep next to them.

Geralt didn’t get much sleep that night, and it wasn’t because of the general stink coming off the Blue Stripes. Duny’s breath was rising and falling against his side in a steady low rhythm. Geralt could’ve shaken him awake in a second and asked what the hell was going on. And then he’d know, and then—there was a big blank wall in his head, and whatever was on the other side of it didn’t look anything like his life did now.

He didn’t wake Duny up.

The next morning, another page showed up even before dawn, yawning, and he slipped Geralt a note asking Duny to wait on Queen Calanthe of Cintra. Geralt determinedly went along without asking if he was invited. He wasn’t sure what to expect. Calanthe hadn’t done much talking in the negotiations herself before now: Cintra was a small country right on the border with Nilfgaard, and they weren’t being offered a lot in the deal.

She was a tall woman with iron-grey hair and sharp grey eyes and a weathered, miserly face that allowed very little to show. After they came into the room, she sent her guards away. “Ten men isn’t enough against a witcher, if they want to kill me and be hanged for it,” she said, when the captain protested. “Go on, Althus, I’m the old woman, not you.” Once they left she leaned back in her chair and waved a hand at Duny. “All right, you clever young fellow. You’ve been doing your best to impress. Do it some more. Tell me what new largesse His Imperial Majesty’s envoy is going to scatter among my colleagues today.”

Duny had gone silent, looking at her. After a moment he said quietly, “Nothing more today. He has reached the limits of his authority, I think, and by now he must suspect a shadow negotiation is occurring. He will attempt to go to your colleagues in private, and learn more of what is keeping them back.”

Calanthe nodded, no surprise in her face. “Mm. Yes. I imagine it’s been driving him quite mad, offering one enormous concession after another with not a single break.” She leaned forward. “The interesting thing is, of course, he _does_ mean them, doesn’t he.”

Geralt jerked to look at Duny, but he only raised an eyebrow.

Calanthe smiled, hard. “You see, my realm has been sitting on the uneasy border for six generations now, and so I know a little more of our neighbors to the south than do most of my fellow northern kings. Foltest and the others cannot imagine the power that the trading corporations hold, nor how little the southern aristocracy care for the fate of a million peasants, so far from their city with its golden towers. But I do. It’s true this proposed agreement will be disastrous for Mettina and Nazair and Toussaint. But it’s going to make massive fortunes for the great lords of Nilfgaard proper. They _do_ want this trade agreement, quite badly, and I imagine the emperor is quite desperate to get it for them. He’s never been very secure on his stolen throne, and the ones who put him on it are surely getting impatient to get their return.”

“You are indeed better informed than your colleagues, your Majesty,” Duny said softly. “But you will not explain any of this to them either, of course.”

She narrowed her eyes. “Oh? Why won’t I?”

“Because you know that the one nation which will be offered no concessions is your own,” Duny said. “And if this agreement is sealed, as it will be if the king of Redania comes to believe the Nilfgaardian offer is not a mere trick, then Nilfgaardian soldiers will be crossing that uneasy border you spoke of before the snows have quite melted. The Emperor will need to do something with the impoverished young men of the northern territories, after all, when he has decimated their trade, and conquest generally improves the popularity of a emperor.”

Calanthe sat back, settling into lines of granite. “Very good. You’re doing very nicely. And now you will tell me why _you’re_ concealing the information from my fellow kings. Don’t try to tell me you’re doing it for Cintra, or the North. You’ve got patrician blood from somewhere, unless you stole that nose and ears off another man’s face, and there’s a sound of Nilfgaard in your speech.”

Duny paused. After a moment he said, “I am not doing this for Cintra, that is true. But Cintra does benefit. I will explain my motives to you, under one condition. I wish to ask a boon of you, if you think the service I have done you is worthy of it.”

She snorted. “Saving my kingdom from invasion? I suppose. What is it?”

“I will ask afterwards,” Duny said.

“I am not going to buy a pig I haven’t seen for gold I might not have,” she said tartly.

“I do not ask your promise to grant my request,” Duny said. “Only to hear it.”

She raised an eyebrow. “Planning to ask for something offensive, are you? Well, I’m not that delicate a flower. All right, I’ll hear out your request— _after_ I’ve heard your story.”

And then—Duny _told_ her. Geralt stood there staring at him half indignantly while Duny handed her every little scrap Geralt had pieced together over the course of seven damn years. “I was born to one of the noble houses of Nilfgaard,” Duny said. “While I was still a boy, my family were murdered and I was cursed into the form of a beast. Through good fortune, I escaped my imprisonment and fled to the sanctuary of the North, where Master Vesemir of the Wolf School freed me from my curse. Thus did I become a witcher of the North, and so I have been, ever since.”

“An entire noble family murdered,” Calanthe said sharply. “While you were a child, but old enough to make your way alone? You’re only, what, twenty now. This happened during the imperial coup, didn’t it?”

Geralt drew a sharp breath. It made sense of so much. He knew about the overthrow of Emperor Fergus var Emreis: that story had made it even to Kaer Morhen—but he’d been a kid then himself, thirteen or so, and it had been something far away, not something that mattered, more like a story out of a book than something real. But of course, it had been real. Duny had been thirteen too, then.

“I will be twenty-one in five days’ time,” Duny said quietly. “Yes.” 

Calanthe brooded in silence a moment and then lifted her head and demanded, “What house?”

Duny shook his head. “Not until I have avenged them. I am the only surviving member, in any case.”

She sat back in her chair, tapping her fingers against the arms. “So your family were loyalists, enough to be purged by the usurper and his followers when they killed the emperor. So now you hate him like fire. You’re hoping he gets overthrown.”

Duny inclined his head slightly. “Would you object?”

“It would depend on his replacement,” she said dryly. “I suppose I wouldn’t be sorry for some degree of chaos to the south, however.” She nodded decisively. “All right, young man. I’ll let this game of yours go on. But I’ll have my eye on you, the rest of the way. And now what’s this boon you want of me, for all your interference?”

Geralt was still reeling, how Calanthe had figured it all out so damn fast, and it took a minute to sink in when Duny said, “I wish to marry your daughter.”

It was a toss-up who was more indignant, Geralt or the queen, although she had the advantage of sitting right in front of Duny, for better glaring. “Marry my—!” Calanthe spluttered. “ _You_ —want to marry Pavetta, my heir—a nameless _witcher_ —can you even sire children? I don’t care!” she snapped, when Duny said, “Yes,” and only glared at him even harder. “You _dare_ to ask—”

“As you granted me permission to do,” Duny said pointedly, and Calanthe pulled up short at the reminder and stopped shouting, although she was practically still snorting smoke out her nostrils.

After several moments of deep breaths, she leaned in towards him instead, her eyes glittering. “So I did. And having done so, I suppose I must consider your _request._ But hear me, witcher. You shall marry my daughter only when you have indeed avenged your dead, when the emperor of Nilfgaard falls from his throne, and when you have been restored to the rank and estate to which you were born.” She sat back, the anger in her face easing as she nodded to herself in satisfaction at the terms she’d set. “And you shall have one year in which to do it before I dismiss your suit,” she added pointedly.

Duny inclined his head. “A week will do, I think,” he said. “Or not at all. I thank you, your Majesty.”

Calanthe scowled at him indignantly, and then abruptly she snorted and waved a hand in dismissal. “Go on, get out of here before I change my mind about having you horsewhipped for temerity.”

Geralt had been making a serious effort to restrain himself. He kept it up until they had left the Cintran quarters and were out from under the eyes of Calanthe’s people; half a second after the door closed after them, he grabbed Duny and dragged him to the nearest stairs and up four flights onto a high tower balcony. Geralt was breathing hard, anger bubbling through him. “So Vesemir was right about you, all along,” he said savagely. “It _is_ about politics. You want to marry Queen Calanthe’s daughter? You aren’t just trying to get justice for your father—for your family. You want _in_. You want to be _part_ of— _this_.” He waved a hand at the castle, full of kings and whispers and plotting, twisting and breaking ten thousand lives without ever pulling out a sword. “You want to dive right into this cesspit with the rest of them, be powerful and rich and _important_. You want that more than you want—”

Geralt stopped there, his throat tight. There were too many endings for that. _More than you want to protect people,_ he wanted to say. _More than you want to do some damn good in the world with your own hands, instead of helping human corpsers to feed off it. More than you want—me._ His eyes were burning with tears. “Ah, forget it,” he said, hoarsely, and shoved Duny back hard against the railing and turned away. “Good luck getting your princess,” he said bitterly over his shoulder. “I’m leaving. There’s a village down the road, there’ll be a contract I can pick up.”

“Geralt,” Duny said.

“Fuck off,” Geralt said flatly, because he wasn’t going to stick around and listen to whatever explanation Duny could come up with, he wasn’t going to hear all the reasons it was okay—

“ _Geralt!_ ” Duny said, and his voice cracked. It hadn’t in all the seven years Geralt had known him, not once. Geralt shut his eyes. He had his hand on the door, and he knew it was a goddamn mistake, he knew he needed to open that door and keep walking, but he turned around instead. Duny wasn’t looking at him. Duny was staring out to the south, his face rigidly blank, jaw clenched.

“Well?” Geralt said harshly.

Duny didn’t say anything. “For your sake, I should not speak,” he said finally, almost inaudible. “I have known this day would come from the moment first you kissed me, in Kaer Morhen, all those years ago. I swore to myself that when it came, I would not hold you.”

“ _Hold_ me?” Geralt said. “You just announced you’re looking to marry the crown princess of Cintra, I don’t think you need to worry.”

Duny made a sharp flicking gesture of dismissal, pfft, wanting to marry someone else, what was that. “Vesemir was not wholly wrong. But he did not know what to fear. The danger has never been to my neutrality, Geralt. Only to yours.”

“What, because you think I’m going to _sign on_ for this?” Geralt said, incredulously. “You think I’m going to help you play this game? You’ve known all along you were going to get right back in, the first chance you got—”

“My name is Emhyr var Emreis,” Duny said.

Geralt stopped cold. One answer after another went slowly, inexorably falling into place— _my father taught me_ , how to know what men would do and how to rule them and how to win battles with soldiers and preparation— _what kid gets handed Malthus in the original,_ the fucking emperor-to-be, that was who. _This happened during the imperial coup, didn’t it?_ Calanthe had said. And it had. It had.

“You’re the crown prince of Nilfgaard,” Geralt said out loud, loading it up with all the disbelief he could manage, hoping it would sound ridiculous. Horribly, it didn’t.

Duny turned to face him with his clear cold grey eyes. “No, Geralt,” he said softly, and for one moment Geralt stared at him in a desperate, last-ditch hope, and then Duny— _Emhyr—_ said, “My father is dead. I am the emperor of Nilfgaard. And have been, so long as you have known me.”

“Oh, fuck me,” Geralt said flatly, and turned and walked away.

#

He took his gear out of the stables, saddled up, and rode away. Two days down the road, he saw a big cloud of dust ahead; he had to get his horse off the road to make way for an oncoming company of Nilfgaardian soldiers: heavy cavalry and infantry carrying two enormous eagle banners, with a huge gilded carriage rolling along in their midst. “Hey,” he called, to one of the foot soldiers at the back, and jerked his chin at the carriage. “Somebody important?” He’d learned enough Nilfgaardian for that already.

“The Emperor of Nilfgaard,” the man said, before marching on.

“Yeah, that’s what he thinks,” Geralt muttered under his breath savagely. It wasn’t even a surprise, after all that bullshit Duny had piled on the kings of Redania and Aedirn about being offended the emperor hadn’t shown up in person. Looked like Duny was going to hit his timeline, too: in one week, or not at all.

Geralt put his horse back on the road and kept going. He made it the rest of the day, but that night he camped alone and found himself trying to remember how many crossbows there had been and then he angrily kicked dirt over his fire and got back on his equally irritated horse. He got back to Fort Adelron in the morning two days later, just in time for the festivities: the breakfast meeting was about to convene. “Where were you?” Roche demanded, when Geralt showed up outside the big chamber.

“On the Path,” Geralt said grimly, and went in. Duny was talking quietly with Queen Calanthe. He went motionless when he saw Geralt, and his eyes followed him. Geralt stalked to the Temerian banner and put himself next to Foltest’s chair. The Nilfgaardian contingent was directly across from them, although the Emperor hadn’t shown up yet, obviously waiting until everyone else was assembled to take his place. Geralt stared at the empty chair. He could have put three knives at throat-height, one at the heart, and another one right between the eyes, all in the space of a minute. No guard in the fucking place could’ve stopped him. He wondered how Duny was planning to do it. Also how Duny was planning to avoid getting executed after. He rolled his shoulders, feeling the weight of his steel sword on his back.  

Duny stepped up to the other side of Foltest’s chair. The king of Redania had just arrived, taking his throne next to Foltest. All the Northern kings were assembled; the envoy from Nilfgaard rose and bowed, all the Nilfgaardians rose, and the Emperor came in.

He looked oddly familiar for a moment. He looked a little like Duny, Geralt realized: the same nose, the same coloring. The resemblance stopped there. The Emperor looked older than he probably was. His whole face had sagged into frowning lines, a downturned mouth and heavy jowls pulling everything down, and his eyes darted around the room. Geralt glanced over Foltest’s head. Duny had tilted his head down. He was wearing a leather hood, pulled a little forward. Nothing obvious, just making it harder to get a good look at his face. His eyes were fixed on the surface of the table, and his jaw was tight. This was the guy who’d killed his father.

But Duny didn’t throw a knife. He didn’t do a thing. Most of the first hour was eaten up by the chief Nilfgaardian envoy, Lord Ithnios, who stood up and made an elegant and agonizingly boring speech about how the Emperor had made the long journey from Nilfgaard to demonstrate beyond the question of a doubt his love of peace and his desire to forward better relations with their Northern neighbors through a vast increase in trade, to the benefit of all, et cetera and so on, to show his respect for his brother monarchs, blah blah.

Then all the _other_ kings had to make a speech of welcome in answer, which ate up two more hours, and then Ithnios stood up again and laid out all the terms of the offer from the top, including every sweet provision he’d dangled all along the way. It made a pretty long and attractive list. All the Northern kings exchanged looks, indecisive; even Foltest was biting on the edge of his lower lip in thought, narrow-eyed. “And to these terms,” Ithnios declared, finishing up with a flourish of a gesture to the Emperor, “His Imperial Majesty has come to set his very own hand and seal, that all of you may know their worth.”

The whole room turned to look at the Emperor, who stood up, assuming a practiced smile, and put a hand over his heart, about to launch into a speech of his own.

“Their _worth_ ,” Duny said softly, into the waiting silence, every syllable sharp as a knife with scorn.

Everyone who’d been looking expectantly at the Emperor jerked around and stared at Duny instead, all of them taken aback and open-mouthed. The Emperor was gaping too, and the entire Nilfgaardian gaggle; the sergeant from the stables was standing with ten of his men on duty, staring.

“What _worth_ is there, I wonder,” Duny went on still softly, ignoring their stares, “in a false seal, set down by the hand of an oathbreaker, to a document full of lies?”

The Emperor was flushing straight up from the bottom of his chin to the top of his face, so angry he was going mottled. Ithnios was staring in total stricken horror. “What—who—King Foltest!” he gasped out. Foltest was gawking up at Duny himself. “Who is this insolent—what is the meaning of this outrageous—”

Duny reached up and heaved off his hooded cowl and his sword harness along with it, interruping the splutter with the loud ringing clatter as the long witcher blades crashed to the ground, hilts clanging. “Do you not know me, Ithnios?” he said. He looked straight at the Emperor. “What of you, usurper? Do _you_ see nothing of my father in me?”

Ithnios stopped talking open-mouthed. The color was draining right back out of the Emperor’s face, leaving him pasty. No one else was saying a word, lords and kings staring back and forth in utter blank confusion. Only Calanthe had drawn a sharp breath, sudden realization spreading across her face.

Duny smiled mirthlessly. “Perhaps I should not be surprised. It has been eight years since last we met. Shall I assist your memory?” He held up his right hand and pulled the gauntlet smoothly off, revealing the heavy golden ring with its black stone on his hand. “ _Here_ is the true seal of the Empire, of which you bear only the counterfeit. My father had me swallow it, just before you and your traitors broke into his chambers.”

The Emperor was recovering from his shock. “This is nonsense,” he snapped. “King Foltest, I do not know for what purpose you have trotted out this trumped-up imposter—”

Duny was still holding up his ringed hand, but with the other he made a small subtle gesture at waist height; Geralt just barely registered the faint glittering sensation of a very faint _Axii_ charm going out, and the Emperor choked off tongue-tied.

“I confess, I have been curious how you managed the coronation,” Duny went on into the silence. He gently pushed the table in front of Foltest out of his way, so he could walk across the open space to face the Nilfgaardians. Every eye was on him. “Did you bribe some attendant to put a false scepter on the Altar of the Great Sun, so it wouldn’t burn your traitor’s hands when you picked it up?”

Duny had gotten to the Nilfgaardian side. He stopped directly in front of the Emperor and drew off the ring. “You killed my father for this ring,” he said softly, holding it up. “Take it now, usurper, and see how it suits you.”

The Emperor was staring at him, still a little dazed, and then Duny deliberately reached out. The Emperor jerked and tried to back away, too late: Duny had got his hand tight in his grip, holding it with witcher strength. As he shoved the ring down onto the Emperor’s finger, Geralt felt him cast _Igni_ , wordless, and the Emperor screamed as his hand burst into flames.

The entire Nilfgaardian company all jerked back—the whole room surged onto their feet, gasps and cries going round the room, but the noise was all drowned out by the Emperor’s rising shrieks: the flames were spreading, his enormously elaborate silken robes going up like kindling, his hair catching. The table caught beneath him, too, but Duny kept holding him, standing unscathed amid the flames—as if it was some sort of holy cleansing fire that only burned a traitor. Geralt was the only one whose eyes could pick out the golden flickers of the Quen shield.

Lord Ithnios had recoiled from the emperor’s side to avoid the fire, frantically beating sparks out of his sleeve. He looked around wild-eyed for help, but all the rest of the nobles were cringing away with fear, and the Nilfgaardian sergeant and his men weren’t making a single move to intervene: most of them had their fists over their hearts, and a few of them had literally dropped to their knees. There were even a few priests in the noble contingent, and one of them was clearly a true believer, staring at the blaze with religious fervor and clutching at his sun amulet, his lips soundlessly moving in the words of a chant.

Igni was meant to end fights quick; it burned hot and fast. It wasn’t more than a minute before the Emperor stopped screaming and Duny let go of a smoking, charred husk. The body fell to the ground and smashed apart into large cinders. Duny bent down into the heap and gently lifted out the unmarred golden band of the ring. Of course, Igni would at least have left the ring hot, even if it hadn’t melted it outright, so he’d probably palmed the real one and stuck a fake on the Emperor’s hand. Nice touch, Geralt thought, clinically. He looked around at the open, stunned faces ringing the table, kings and lords and hard-bitten soldiers all reduced to almost childlike wonder. It put a burning, sour taste in the back of his throat.

He’d thought he would have to _do_ something. He’d finally have to throw himself into the mess to save Duny—or stand by and watch him die, like a choice between jumping into quicksand or taking a red-hot knife in the gut. Instead he felt miles distant from it all—watching a play, actors moving on a stage to words that Duny had written. And Duny hadn’t put in a part for him. There wasn’t a witcher in this story.

Then Geralt looked down at the floor, at the swords Duny had dropped, and he realized, that included Duny himself. He hadn’t taken his vengeance as a witcher, with signs and steel and inhuman strength, not as far as anyone else in this room knew. That wasn’t the story Duny wanted to tell. His enemies weren’t going to fear a witcher, and common soldiers weren’t going to follow one; people spat in the dirt when witchers went by.

He wanted everyone to walk out of this room with a story that would spread through every corner of his empire and become a legend: the rightful emperor returned with the very gods on his side, throwing off a witcher disguise and calling down divine retribution on a traitor. That was a story good enough to take an empire with, and Duny was going to need it. He didn’t have an army and he didn’t have money; he’d fled his empire at the age of thirteen, and his nobles and his merchants had all fallen right in line behind the guy he’d just killed. The story was all he had to work with.

And to keep them telling that story, he was going to have to make it true. Vesemir really hadn’t needed to worry. Duny was never going to pick up those swords, never going to use his magic again—because if people saw him using witcher powers, this moment stopped being a mystical revelation and became a dirty fight between a trained killer with sorcery and steel and an unarmed nobleman in a silk robe. He’d probably never so much as spar in a ring for exercise. From now on, he’d rely on ordinary soldiers to stand between him and the blades of his enemies.

Duny put the ring back on his hand and turned to face Ithnios and the handful of Nilfgaardian lords gathered into a tight paralyzed knot. He surveyed them, unsmiling, in a posture of total arrogance. “Some of the houses of Nilfgaard followed the usurper eagerly,” Duny said, with a flick of his hand to the charred corpse at his feet. “Some followed reluctantly, to avoid civil war. Some, because they believed the lies he told about my father. A very few held to their oaths and refused to follow at all despite the cost. For those few, where I can now find them, there shall be reward. But to the rest, all alike, I shall offer one chance and one only of amnesty. That chance comes now to those of you here. Renew your oaths of fealty, and keep them henceforth, and whatever your part, it shall be forgiven. Refuse this offer—and the usurper’s death awaits you as well.” He raised his hand, clenched into a fist. “To this oath, I, Emhyr var Emreis, set _my_ seal, in the sight of the Great Sun,” he said softly.

Before any of the nobles had a chance to answer him, though, Duny turned away from them, to face the soldiers directly instead. “Master Sergeant Atronis of the House of Sirion,” Duny said, and the sergeant from the stable jumped out of his gawking stare and straightened up to instant parade. “Your house was first named at the Battle of Ravenna, and ever since, it has given soldiers of great honor to the Empire. One of them served in my father’s guard. He died standing before the doors of the imperial quarters, fighting to the end, though the traitors offered to let him surrender. In his memory, I offer the chance first to you. Will you give me your oath?”

After a single blank-staring moment, the sergeant jerked into motion; he took two steps forward and fell kneeling at Duny’s feet. “Your Imperial Majesty,” he choked out, “I swear my loyalty to the true emperor, and may the Great Sun blight my house if ever I prove false.” He kissed the ring on Duny’s hand, on Emhyr’s hand, and the awestruck priest, who still had tears streaming down his face, suddenly burst out, “Praise to the Great Sun, whose eternal light brings justice!”

The other soldiers all came crowding forward eagerly to swear their oaths in turn. Lord Ithnios was backing slowly towards the door, sickly-pale and sweating, never taking his eyes off Duny; a couple of the other nobles were stepping forward, and the rest were wavering, exchanging uneasy glances between themselves and darting looks at the clamoring soldiers as Duny, drawn up tall and straight and regal, was giving his hand to each of them in turn. The last faint golden glitter of Quen was fading away from around him, a half-seen halo dissolving into the air.

#

“I admit you’re well advised not to see if the loyalty of your newfound soldiers is up to fighting their fellows yet, but you’re also arranging some difficulties for yourself by letting that lot beat you back to Nilfgaard,” Queen Calanthe said, jerking her chin over the parapets. Ithnios and a couple other noblemen had sidled out of the chamber during the oathtaking. They’d rounded up about half of the former emperor’s personal guard from outside the fort and were now riding away south like all the forces of hell were on their tails.

The rest of the soldiers were busy drinking and celebrating the return of their emperor: Zoltan and Dandelion had driven up to the fort half an hour ago in a cart carrying twelve large casks of dwarven spirits. “Why, I thought for sure you knew we were coming, lad,” Zoltan had said to Geralt when he showed up. “Duny put a hint in my ear there’d be work for a good weaponsmith down here, and while he was at it, there was a fat contract going begging to bring in some decent Mahakaman home-brewed. Seemed a good business opportunity.”

It had been, all around. The arrival of the liquor had probably single-handedly peeled off the other half of the emperor’s guard and kept them in Emhyr’s grip. A solid company of men for the price of one wagonload of spirits. Not to mention Dandelion had nearly had a paroxysm of joy over finally learning the rest of Emhyr’s story and was literally interrogating every single soldier who’d been in the room preparatory to putting out a song on the subject. Geralt had escaped into the fort and come back up to avoid him, but he wasn’t betting on the long-term success of his strategy.

Emhyr had a hand resting on the parapet; he didn’t look particularly concerned watching the nobles’ cloud of dust travel away down the road. “They will not beat me to Nilfgaard.”

“Oh?” Calanthe said sharply.

“They will not reach Nilfgaard at all. There are several dozen Scoia’tael elven sharpshooters waiting for them, hidden in the forest along the road.”

“Hmph.” Calanthe folded her arms and scowled. “Thought of everything, have you? So what’s next? You’re going to take your three hundred soldiers and make a triumphant return to the city yourself, to the song of a thousand trumpets blowing to welcome back the true Emperor? Think it’ll be that easy?”

“I shall first pay an imperial visit to the dukes of Nazair, Metinna, and Toussaint.” Emhyr turned over his hand in a slight gesture. “I imagine once they have read over the full set of terms that the usurper was preparing to offer the North, they will be quite eager to provide me with sufficient troops to make my entrance on a scale appropriate to imperial dignity.”

She snorted, but it was grudgingly respectful. “Well, you haven’t been crowned at the altar of the Great Sun yet, boy, and don’t expect to come looking for Pavetta’s hand until you are.”

“It will not be a year,” Emhyr said quietly. “Look for me at the end of the next summer, before the leaves once more begin to turn.”

He finally turned to face Geralt after she left. Down in the courtyard, the drinking was going full swing, and some of the men were breaking out instruments. The Northern soldiers had joined in the celebration: not a man of them was going to pass up free liquor and an excuse to party, and the Blue Stripes were loudly telling everyone who’d listen—and plenty of people would—that they’d known Emhyr was the emperor in disguise all along. “You can tell he ain’t really a witcher, he don’t have the eyes,” Geralt had already overheard more than once.

Geralt leaned against the parapet. “Looks like you did a nice job of it all around. How’d you get the Scoia’tael to sign on exactly?”

Emhyr shrugged. He had his hands clasped behind his back. “I promised to protect the interests of the Elder Races in the North, even at the cost of war.”

“War with Foltest,” Geralt said.

“If need be,” Emhyr said.

Geralt looked away and ran a hand over his face. “You can’t make things even a little easy, can you, you bastard,” he said tightly.

Emhyr made a small abortive move towards him, his hand a restive horse he had to rein in. He said, low and almost rasping, “If I did, it would be a lie.”

“Yeah? What’s one more?”

“I have never lied to _you_ ,” Emhyr said.

“No,” Geralt said. “You’ve never lied to me, and you’ve never asked me for help, and you’ve never leaned on me or needed me. And in a couple years your soldiers will start marching out of Cintra, because hey, conquest improves an emperor’s popularity, and you’ll need some way to keep those trade corporations happy since they’re not getting this deal—”

“You are a quick study,” Emhyr said softly. His eyes were resting on Geralt’s face.

“Fuck off,” Geralt said.

Emhyr took a cautious step towards him. “Geralt.”

Geralt folded his arms across his chest. “We’re _done_ ,” he said through his teeth. “You’ve made sure you don’t owe me a damn thing, and you haven’t got anything I want anyway—”

“I love you,” Emhyr said: absolutely flat; he might’ve been saying _sun’s out_ today or _there’s a bug on your shirt_ or _ghoul coming on your left_. “I ought not, for a thousand reasons, and yes, I have done nothing to bind you to me, for I can indeed offer you nothing that you want. Even my own hand is not mine to bestow. All that I am belongs to the Empire.”

“Yeah. Just the way you _planned_ it, all along,” Geralt said.

 Emhyr was silent for a moment, and then he said very softly, so softly only a witcher could even have heard him, “There is a touch of foresight in my line, born of our elven blood. My father had it also. Eight years ago, on the morning of my thirteenth birthday, he woke me at dawn and took me secretly to the altar of the Great Sun, and there he made the Heirophant administer to me the Imperator’s Oath, which should only have been done with enormous pomp and ceremony that evening. Three hours later he was under the knives of the usurper’s torturers, watching me being cursed into bestial form before he died in grotesque agony. To the last, he refused to repudiate my claim to the throne.”

Emhyr stopped for a moment. Then he said hoarsely, “Geralt, I could more easily cut out my own heart than betray his sacrifice. And so I will have done, if you—”

He stopped again and looked away over the parapet, his throat working visibly through a swallow. Geralt looked away too, his eyes stinging. It made a mockery of Emhyr’s cool words to Calanthe, his emotionless description: _my family was murdered and I was cursed into a beast_. This was what it had really been: spending his thirteenth birthday in a dungeon’s bowels, being twisted into a monstrous body, watching men slice his father to pieces. And his own father putting an entire empire on his raw shoulders and sealing the oath with his blood.

Everything he’d put himself through since then, everything he’d become—the agonies of the mutagens and the trials, all the endless hours of training and iron discipline. Those long afternoons in the courtyard of Kaer Morhen under the thin Northern sun, his swords sweeping in mirror of Geralt’s own. The drudgery of contracts and drowners and ghouls, eating stale bread when they didn’t come fast enough. And a few snatched moments of love in a small quiet room in Vizima, with the curtains drawn to shut the world outside. All of it just to survive, to get him here, to this moment. And now a whole life painfully built up had to be put aside.

Emhyr was staring southward at the line of mountains that marked the border with Nilfgaard. He’d cross them tomorrow. All his arrangements had worked out. The usurper was dead. In the morning, his soldiers would be hung over and quiet and they’d go along pretty docile, even if the first flush of excitement over the emperor’s return had faded. It was only two days’ march to the capital of Nazair; he’d get to the duke before he’d have to figure out how to pay them. His enemies wouldn’t even see him coming.

He’d walked the Path all the way here. Now he was turning off it, back onto his father’s imperial road, and he didn’t get to take anything with him, not magic, not steel, not silver. He’d already taken off the wolf medallion. He was going. The only question was whether Geralt was going with him.

“Goddammit,” Geralt said resignedly. Vesemir was going to be so goddamn pissed off at him. But when he crossed to the parapet, Emhyr—Duny—turned and caught his shoulders and kissed him and kissed him again, his hands viciously tight, gripping like he’d never let go.

# End

**Works inspired by this one:**

  * [That Which We Call a Home](https://archiveofourown.org/works/13067841) by [Iuris](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Iuris/pseuds/Iuris)
  * [Someday](https://archiveofourown.org/works/13410831) by [SOMILK](https://archiveofourown.org/users/SOMILK/pseuds/SOMILK)




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